North Carolina hog farms importing 826,733 tons of corn from Brazil

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North Carolina hog farms importing 826,733 tons of corn from Brazil. Meanwhile, thanks to Global Warming alarmists and liberal pipe dreams, the U.S. will turn 4.3 billion bushels of corn into ethanol for automobile gas tanks in 2012. This is what Mugabe did to Zimbabwe – turned a food exporter into a food importer.

This post was last modified on January 26, 2021

J.P. Travis: Born and raised in Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1976 graduate of University of Michigan, father, grandfather, husband, founder and CEO of Travelyn Publishing (http://www.travelynpublishing.com/), and passionate anti-government believer in individual liberty.

View Comments (59)

  • What goes unsaid here is that the farmer does NOT want to feed his hogs american GMO corn because he has a shred of dignity left and his concern for his fellow man being harmed by eating his product.

    Just wait until Monsanto forces their frankenfoods to be used or be sent to jail for non-compliance and having the audacity to NOT give them your money!

    Besides, with a worldwide shortage of pigs & hogs (thanks again islam) the last remaining unaltered food-source animals are being transformed into something that is a walking, snorting, poison-factory on four legs.

  • Apparently, no one has been paying attention. The US has imported grain, beef, pork and other food products for decades. Even as a corn grower, I think ethanol is a stupid idea, but it gets unfairly blamed for food shortages. WE ARE IN A DROUTH, people. Yields this fall are non existent on dryland fields and just OK on irrigated. If we are to get rid of ethanol, it needs to be on the basis of stopping stupid spending on GREEN products and using our tax money to subsidize these boondoggles, not sound like a bunch of OWSers who demonize something in their rush to the perfect world.

      • I highly doubt that they have anything resembling intelligence going on at the EPA. More like, they probably figure that a lot of TEA party types are in agriculture, and want to find a way of silencing opposition.

      • Jeeze, Latin, and you made fun of me using aglet in a pun? (lmao, spell-check just put a squiqqle under aglet)

    • Is that the best they train people at troll infiltration school these days? Jeeze, wonder what it pays.

      • I went to get gas today at a local Sunoco station. I may have told you about this place before, but I'll repeat myself.
        They sell ethanol free gas there. The price is high, $1 more than regular ethanol, but it's 90 octane, and won't damage my engine. It also gives me better gas mileage, and the truck doesn't run so hot.
        All in all, I think it's worth the extra expense.

          • Well, you can get non-ethanol fuel for "antique" vehicles and small engines, it's just that they don't monitor it too closely at self serve stations. I was getting 11mpg with ethanol, I put 10 gallons in the truck and at 110 miles, I still had about 3 gallons left! Therefore making it worth the initial cost.

          • Ethanol free gas is getting harder to find around here...one BP station close to my house had it untill about a week ago and I too felt the higher price was worth it. Now they have signs posted everywhere that their fuel is 10% ethanol. Seems like whenever I get the ethanol, my car burns through faster. One tank full used to last a full week before I had to fill up again. When I get the ethanol gas seems like I have to fill up again in 4 or 5 days. I was averaging 24-25 miles per gallon, now its down to 19-20. Ethanol sucks. Why do I sense that is the plan?

          • It is the plan, the Obama "Under my administration, energy prices will necessarily skyrocket" plan!

          • Looks like that one Obama fan was correct. She doesn't have to worry about putting "gas" in her car. Pretty soon we will all be riding bicycles again. But hey, maybe Obamacare won't reject my total knee replacement that I'll need after I pedal for 35 miles each way between home and the hospital I work in. Depending on if they view me as a contributing member of society or not.

          • It isn't your imagination that you get lower mileage. Ethanol carries less recoverable energy per gallon. It's pretty hard to beat plain old gasoline.

          • JP, I read your stuff* and that comment struck a chord and sent me searching. This is old but I found it and you might be able to work it into a commentary. Always helps when you can smack somebody over the head with facts they can relate to in their everyday life. Any way, I thought it was interesting.

            http://www.exxonmobilperspectives.com/2011/12/14/how-many-gallons-of-gasoline-would-it-take-to-charge-an-iphone/?utm_source=paid.outbrain.com&utm_medium=cpc

            *Always TRY to hit an archive when at the site to see what's up. And the streams. While I agree about 95% of the time, it'd be scary to agree all the way all the time, even with a spouse. And I think the Dem Justice Dept. is messing with my bookmarks, disappears every time I try, but there's a really nice 'puter savvy lady who helps me out all the time. If she's out there, I swear, this time I'll get a tat, what was that address again?

          • Ghost, that's JPAttitude.com.

            JPAttitude.com

            once move that's JPAttitude.com

            If you're in the neighborhood stop on by folks. You'll be glad you did...JPAttitude.com :D

            er, uhm, JP...Ghost and I are still waiting on that first paycheck ;)
            huh? What do you mean we're in for a long wait????

          • Awe, thanks Ghost. I'm trying my best to get well. The antibiotics have helped but I think something is being missed...My doc wants me to come back in for more labs....comprehensive metabolic panel check...Just to make sure it isn't a vitamin or mineral deficiency causing the nerve issues. So I will be going back to see him again this week. If that comes back with in normal limits then I think he's going to send me to a nuerologist...then we'll go from there. Thanks for the well wishes.

            As for my general smart-acenees as my daddy says, I get it natural like...daddy is the same way. I look like my mom and think like my dad. Not sure if that's good or bad but that's how it is.

            Jimmy Buffett song??? If there is it isn't coming to mind right now. Maybe if you hum a few bars...

          • You're a doll, and I do like his site, and the running banter. If some don't like it... O K? And crack the whip and tell the MDs to get it fixed already.

            Seriously Lucy, hope it works out. Some of us look forward to UR insight and general smart-assedness.

            Wasn't there a Jimmey Buffett song that spoke of a new dawn coming? Please get well my friend.

          • Interesting link. According to the article, E85 has 25% less energy per gallon than plain old gasoline. And that part about a gallon of gasoline having enough energy to power an IPhone for 20 years is a cool factoid, isn't it?

          • The way lead works is all tied up in how and why we want to raise "octane" levels.

            If you take gasoline and air at a 20:1 mix, and gradually compress it, it will explode at a certain pressure. This is, of course, happening in your car each time the piston comes up on the compression stroke. If it explodes too soon, instead of pushing the crankshaft one way, it is pushing it backwards, and the resulting noise is an audible "ping" or "knock"

            That's bad, of course, and so you add or do stuff so that your fuel/air mixture explodes at a higher pressure, when the spark plug creates the spark at the right time. Lead is just one way to do that -- more careful refining like with aviation fuel will also do that.

            Moving away from lead had nothing to do with safety and air quality -- directly, that is. A catalytic converter in your exhaust sits there, taking unburnt fuel and longer chain molecules that would make smog, and reacts with them to reduce these waste gases to CO2 and water vapor. The catalytic converter uses ceramics, and is doped with stuff like platinum, and if you shot a bunch of lead vapor by it, that would stick and then your catalytic converter would stop working. Probably plug up, as a matter of fact.

            That's why we went away from lead -- not because inhaling lead vapor is harmful (which it is). Lead was a dirt cheap way of raising octane. Alcohol does it too. So would water or horse pee, but you'd need alcohol or something to keep it in suspension. That, of course is why we don't add Budweiser to our gas tanks -- it may fall into the horse pee category IMO, but doesn't have enough alcohol in it to do any good as a fuel additive.

          • Different drought spellings are a regional thing. Much like my pronouncing "washcloth" as "warshcloth", and "Washington DC" as "F*cking idiots"

          • @flash, why I love coming here(to get smacked around), the way you put it brought what I read a year ago back into focus. I equated more efficient with more bang (in the fuel) for the buck in my mind.

            But still, if it's more efficient and you use less to get the job done, shouldn't we...never mind. Hope the Faire this past weekend was a good one.

          • Older cars that were designed to run on leaded fuel had the valve seats cast as part of the head, then machined to seal. With unleaded fuel, hardened steel valve seats have to be installed, or in newer cars, they came with them. Lead was for the most part, a lubricant. It doesn't burn, and it actually IS a bad idea to introduce lead particles into the air we breathe.

            As for the "educated farmer" above, wouldn't a real educated farmer know how to spell drought?

          • If I remember correctly, the lead also helps lubricate the valve guides and other internal engine parts. Ever since they took the lead out, they had to go from steel to brass valve guides, and they wear faster. That's why you need a valve job much sooner than you used to.

          • Apparently he thought you had poor quality gas in your system, (must have smelled bad, too) he was telling you to take the TEL out of its storage container and add it to your fuel reserve to increase your octane levels. (and give it a rose scented smell) teehee

          • "From what I understand tetraethyl lead (TEL) boosts the octane levels, higher the octane better the fuel."

            So how come when my father wanted me to move faster, he always said, "Get the lead out?" Huh? Huh?

          • So it works as a catalyst to get more energy out of the gas. Weird, considering how unreactive lead is (or more accurately, how unreactive I thought lead was).

          • Sorry, what I remember is bigger bomb yield smaller package. It is a controlled explosion that drives the mechanics when we're heading happily down the road. More efficient "energy" #s, bigger bang for the buck.

            Kinda like adding diesel to ammonia fertilizer.

          • From what I understand tetraethyl lead (TEL) boosts the octane levels, higher the octane better the fuel.

          • That never made sense to me, why lead helps gasoline work better. I wish someone would explain it to me. It doesn't burn, so how does it help?

          • Forgot, one of the things I found looking into this, if you add the "old" leaded fuel into the mix, the #s go through the roof.

          • That grabbed me too, wanted to call BS so searched at the time. If the definition of energy (the one the science guys don't want to use when talking about "alternative" sources) is used, everything I found backed it up. Just a tip, and another factoid.

    • Listen, all due respect for your inside knowledge as a corn grower, but if you are here floating the silly notion that burning 4.3 billion bushels of corn in automobiles has no effect on corn prices, corn shortages, or corn imports, you must think nobody here has a lick of common sense. This is basic economics and if you never took a basic economics course you should. The article clearly states - and quotes - the hog farmers in NC have never imported corn before. Sure, there was a drought, but the corn shortage is manufactured by the government and if you added 4.3 billion bushels back into the supply then NC hog farmers would have that much more corn available to feed their hogs. Ethanol is not being unfairly blamed for anything. If anything, ethanol isn't being blamed enough. It's great for you, increasing the prices you get, but meanwhile millions of people around the world are going hungry and starving to death because we all know - or should know - what increased food prices do to the poor slobs who live on the edge.

    • wornout farmer, maybe you missed the point here.
      We think ethanol is a huge mistake. We are against it totally.
      Reduced mileage, damaging engines, and depleting the food supply, are just the beginning.
      We don't oppose importing corn, it's just that the stupidity of the EPA has made things worse.

      • I think you miss the point. It is cheaper to import corn to the east coast than it is to ship from the Midwest. If you look at the millions of acres that not currently cut for silage due to distillers grains, it lessens the effect of corn for ethanol. I most emphatically do not endorse using ethanol, but the amount it affects corn prices is less than the current world wide shortages of grain due to drouth. My point is that saying that people are starving due to ethanol make that argument sound like a bunch of libs with their "the world is ending" due to whatever the current scare is. Ethanol needs to be ended with logic, not scare tactics.

        • "Ethanol needs to be ended with logic, not scare tactics."

          Again, you need some basic education in economics. You can list other factors all day long, but regardless of other factors when you add 4.3 billion bushels of demand to the corn economy you raise the price, and when you raise the price of corn you raise the price of all other agricultural commodities whch raises the price of food in general, and when that happens the people on the edge starve. I can cite you studies if you want but I think you're going to ignore the evidence, cash your ill-made ethanol checks which come from my pocket every time I put fuel in my car, and pretend your conscience isn't nagging at you.

          To make it clear, I would have no problem with farmers making money off ethanol if it was an honest profit created by the free market, but ethanol is no way profitable or economically sensible without massive federal subsidies which ALSO come out of my pocket in the form of taxes. So I'm paying you money both at the gas station and via the IRS. As you might be able to tell, it pisses me off and makes me unwilling to accept your apologies for ethanol politely. Get back to me when you're of the government dole.

          • I actually don't have such a problem with ethanol. I don't care for the subsidies and the governmental stupidity that creates artificially high fuel prices that makes it viable.

            When we take corn, grind it up, ferment it, boil off the alcohol, we are left with animal feed that has a higher protein content -- it's actually a better feed than before they started. The corn that gets used this way would have been fed to animals anyway -- that's primarily what field corn is used for.

            It is an inefficient way of getting auto fuel, but it does not impact food markets like people would have you believe. Also, the corn you'd use this way is often unfit for animal use -- high moisture content, mold, etc -- but is decent animal food when done processing.

            So far as a farmer being on the government dole -- this doesn't happen because of ethanol subsidies. Not directly, anyway. wornout farmer is getting a bad rap here. Now, if he participates in farm programs like set aside, and other programs aimed at artificially increasing market prices, he may be guilty of "being on the dole" -- but no more so than a businessman who deducts the costs of his equipment depreciation.

            The ethanol subsidies do not get paid to him directly -- they just remove enough corn from the market to make prices higher -- somewhere up to a living wage, if I recall correctly. Up until the 1990's, corn was at $2.50 a bushel, pretty much where it was since the thirties.

            The narrative from both sides is distraction and blame shifting. If we're hacking on farmers for selling their food at market prices that are artificially high, then we aren't looking at the scumbags in DC that *raised* the prices. On both sides.

          • "The ethanol subsidies do not get paid to him directly — they just remove enough corn from the market to make prices higher."

            Isn't that a distinction without a difference? My money is being used to subsidize something I don't want, and the result is me paying more for food. I don't give a flying you-know-what whether there's one or two intermediate steps between the federal treasury and wornout farmer - it's still feeding at the trough, plain and simple.

            As for the ethanol by products being used as feed, a quick Google search informs me that cattle feed can only be 10% by product before it starts making the cattle sick. The ethanol by products are high in sulphur (added to make the fementation work), don't store well, and support dangerous mold growth. Bottom line, we're never going to reach a point where ethanol production makes economic sense. Feeding by products to cattle is just Americans trying to make lemonade out of lemons.

          • re "Isn’t that a distinction without a difference?"

            All the difference in the world. wornout farmer has no choice in the matter, and shouldn't get hacked on for it, any more than we should be punished for having artificially low pork prices. When a farmer sells his grain, he has little choice -- few of them actually export anything. They haul it to the grain elevator, and with the exception of being able to time the sale, have little to no control over the price of their commodity. Yes, a few do get into the futures market -- but again, there is little to no control.

            I agree that it is aggravating to pay inflated prices -- but just prefer to choose the targets of my ire more carefully.

        • Look, I'm not saying you're wrong, you obviously know more about the market mechanics than I do. But what about all the stories I read about shortages and outrageous prices for tortillas in Mexico even before the drought? Every one of them blamed the drop in US corn available for export due to ethanol production.

          • So? Mexico ought to be managing their own farm policy, instead of hanging off ours.

            Just because they enjoyed our idiotic giveaway due to bad policy does not mean we have an obligation to continue it. They're essentially a rural, agricultural nation -- why is it they can't grow corn (which originated there)?

          • "why is it they can’t grow corn (which originated there)?"

            What a great question. I just had to repeat it because it's a pure unadulaterated common-sense question with no answer.

          • Sorry, I just posted a long-winded answer to another of your comments. Just when you thought you were free to exit...

  • Well, if I remember correctly, some writers were speculating that food shortages were a large factor in destabilizing a number of nations in the Middle East in 2011 and the situation has not gotten any better. Something about the US making fuel out of food or something. Another gaffe by Romney.

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