the price of milk

[Virage]

It's called Inflation.

[Captain Virgil Hilts]

Originally posted by rpm
Mav, I totally agree we need a different fuel source. Unfortunately that is way down the road. Cellulose methanol is a stop-gap. But, doesn't it make sense to make methanol from the most effective (and least intrusive) crop available?

Methanol will never totally replace gasoline, but every gallon of methanol is one less gallon of gasoline. If we could get up to 20-30% methanol usage it would help stretch what resources we have. Or, we could just continue to suckle at the Exxon/Mobil teat and ignore alternate energy sources completely.

BTW, I have no problems agreeing with Bush. It just does'nt happen very often.

Every TWO gallons of methanol is ONE less gallon of gasoline. Same applies to ethanol.

[Captain Virgil Hilts]

Oh, and the price of milk is as much due to price supports and subsidies as anything.

[SteveBailey]

Originally posted by Gunslinger
Thats great until you are going through a gallon every two days because you have kids.

Yup... I have 4 little milk drinkers and my wife and I both like milk.  The kids go thru a gallon of whole milk every day and they are only 19 months old so it's just going to get worse.  Wife and I go thru almost a gallon of skim/day.  It's ironic that milk is almost twice as expesive as gas.

[Angus]

I'll give you the farmers perspective on this. Well, mine...,,,trust me
1. Demand for dairy products has grown due to more buying potential of many growing countries, - notably the far east.
2. Increased demand for land due to changed consumer habits. You will need many times more land to produce each calory as meat rather than milk, and yet many times more for milk rather than a calorie of grain energy.
3. Crops in very vital parts of the world production of Dairy and as well meat have been on the lower side recently. Climate issues.

[Charon]

This is something I recently took a look at and here are some quotes from a guy at The American Coalition for Ethanol (Lamberty) and by a biodiesel producer (Friedman).

"A cow will eat about 14 pounds of corn a day and give about 6 or 7 gallons of milk, and the cost of the corn that cow eats has gone from about eight to sixteen cents," said Lamberty. "That certainly isn’t an excuse for milk prices to go up  $1.25. I think there’s some people in some of the channels upstream from the guys actually using the corn who are taking advantage of this, and if they were in the oil industry they’d be called gougers.  Last year was a pretty bad year for corn, and that probably had more impact on what’s happening with prices than ethanol. If you look at what could happen this year, we can see two billion bushels more of corn this year translating into almost 5.6 billion gallons of ethanol. So the increase in corn this year would almost supply all of the ethanol we’re going to make this year."
The impact of commodity speculation -- a hot topic in relative to crude and refined product -- is also called into question.“There is plenty of soy to go around, though I don’t know what the issue is for corn,” Friedman said. "But these costs we’re experiencing now -- seeing 33, 34 cents versus 22 cents on the CBOT -- I cannot figure it out except that people are probably speculating."

Obviously they have an industry perspective on food-to-fuel, but I think the points are valid. Speculators are also likely at the heart of various high petroleum prices and volatility issues. A lot of focus is being put on that now, especially over-the-counter, ICE, etc.

Charon