Global Spring?

[CHIEF 5039]

1 hour ago, Immaculate Vibes said:

Not a great year for this. 
 

 

America will not go hungry, but it sucks that so many people depending on us for grain exports are gonna get fucked. Let's see, "wars and rumors of wars." Check. Plague and disease. Check. Famine....check. Someone to erase browser history. CHECK. Plane lined up to go watch the light show over Carswell. Check.

CHIEF

[atomheartbevo 88841]

20 minutes ago, CHIEF said:

Someone to erase browser history. CHECK.

[Macanudo 12674]

Will we be able to keep all of it in the  country though?  Don't the Chinese now own a shit ton of land and the big aggro-businesses will surely do what the oil companies do, sell to the highest bidder.

[staboner 4938]

not sure why the last page was so damn weird. anyway

if this war continues in ukraine for sure we have potential 2+ years guaranteed of this mess going on. the globalized chain of natural gas --- fertilizer ---- food is a problem. surely some countries have contingency plans but of course the poor will suffer mightily. I feel this will be worse than 2010. i don't think that thought is fear pron at all. just reality. 

[CHIEF 5039]

13 minutes ago, Macanudo said:

Will we be able to keep all of it in the  country though?  Don't the Chinese now own a shit ton of land and the big aggro-businesses will surely do what the oil companies do, sell to the highest bidder.

Give them a taste of their own medicine. Charge an export tax that they can't afford.Do you think that companies that produce their products in China can just up and move their production facilities to Central America? China has already shown their hand. You make a deal with the Devil. Your means of production become property of the Chinese Communist Party, patents be damned. Once there, you can never go back. Price them out of the market, recoup some of the trade imbalance. 

This is the worst of times, and the best of times. It's time to take advantage. We are a net exporter of grain. Use that to our advantage.

CHIEF

[Superhero 8588]

It’s been a serious, sometimes political debate whether a person from Taiwan should refer to themselves as Chinese from Taiwan, or Taiwanese.

The current mood is to call our(?)selves Taiwanese. Frankly I’ve been so far removed that I don’t really care. I just want my parents to live out the rest of their lives in peace, without the constant reminder that China wants to “reunite” with Taiwan by force.

 This is just a long winded way of saying. FUCK Xi and FUCK China. 

[ztejas 42750]

29 minutes ago, Superhero said:

It’s been a serious, sometimes political debate whether a person from Taiwan should refer to themselves as Chinese from Taiwan, or Taiwanese.

The current mood is to call our(?)selves Taiwanese. Frankly I’ve been so far removed that I don’t really care. I just want my parents to live out the rest of their lives in peace, without the constant reminder that China wants to “reunite” with Taiwan by force.

 This is just a long winded way of saying. FUCK Xi and FUCK China. 

Dude Pam is going to neg the shit out of you for bringing that anti-China CR stuff up in a DT topic. 

[DigglerontheHoof 20482]

On 4/10/2022 at 8:32 PM, Immaculate Vibes said:

She’s mentally ill. Literally. 

Hilarious coming from your crazy, dumb ass. 

[956 Worldwide 33980]

2 hours ago, Superhero said:

It’s been a serious, sometimes political debate whether a person from Taiwan should refer to themselves as Chinese from Taiwan, or Taiwanese.

The current mood is to call our(?)selves Taiwanese. Frankly I’ve been so far removed that I don’t really care. I just want my parents to live out the rest of their lives in peace, without the constant reminder that China wants to “reunite” with Taiwan by force.

 This is just a long winded way of saying. FUCK Xi and FUCK China. 

What angers the PRC the most? Go with that. 
 

[Parliament 13993]

6 hours ago, Macanudo said:

Will we be able to keep all of it in the  country though?  Don't the Chinese now own a shit ton of land and the big aggro-businesses will surely do what the oil companies do, sell to the highest bidder.

The Chinese own very little land.  They do own a large meat packer, Smithfield Foods.  And the Brazilians own another one, JBS.  And yeah they'll sell to the highest bidder as capitalists always do.

Inflation is gonna go up.  Especially food.  But in the US we are literally surrounded by food.  We'll be better off than most nations.

 

 

[Schulz2.0 28616]

 

[Pam Cummings 9413]

3 hours ago, ztejas said:

Dude Pam is going to neg the shit out of you for bringing that anti-China CR stuff up in a DT topic. 

Lmao, have you gotten a clue yet? Still think VJ is a better golfer than Scottie?

[Nivek 16653]

Imran straight up tweeted that it was all a U.S. plot and called for protests. Massive protests across the country. Shit is wack.  I maintain the subcontinent is still the region most likely to melt down into nuclear exchanges and I think that’s true even with Russia in Ukraine.  
 
It looks like tons of people are out on the street.  Only a matter of time before bombs start going off. 
 
 

I can never not hear that Howard Stern fan song:
Imran Khan lives with his Dad and Mom, he smoke pot all day and doesn’t use a bong

[F250 28419]

5 hours ago, Superhero said:

It’s been a serious, sometimes political debate whether a person from Taiwan should refer to themselves as Chinese from Taiwan, or Taiwanese.

The current mood is to call our(?)selves Taiwanese. Frankly I’ve been so far removed that I don’t really care. I just want my parents to live out the rest of their lives in peace, without the constant reminder that China wants to “reunite” with Taiwan by force.

 This is just a long winded way of saying. FUCK Xi and FUCK China. 

[Bevo 13420]

Bananas Have Died Out Once Before

 

Modern bananas are a monoculture. It’s only a matter of time before some bug or fungus strikes, and many experts believe that strike is coming very soon.

 

 

You probably take bananas for granted. In the United Kingdom, one in four pieces of fruit consumed is a banana and, on average, each Briton eats 10 kg of bananas per year; in the United States, that’s 12 kg, or up to 100 bananas. When I ask people, most seem to think bananas grow on trees. But they don’t, in either the literal or the figurative sense: in fact, they’re in danger of extinction.

I knew almost nothing about bananas when I landed in Costa Rica in 2011. I was a young scientist from the University of Michigan on a scholarship to study abroad, with fantasies of trapping and identifying tropical fish in pristine rainforest streams. But the institute I was enrolled at brought us to a banana plantation, and from the moment I set foot on the dense, dark clay beneath that endless green canopy, my fish fantasy evaporated. I became fascinated by the fruit I found growing on large, towering herbs, lined up in rows in their tens of thousands.

Bananas are one of the oldest known cultivated plants, but were first grown in the United States in the 1880s, by entrepreneurs involved in early plantations in Jamaica. This new fruit was odd-looking, originally with seeds, and would grow only in very particular tropical climates. For years, the fruit was an unreliable product due to its short ripening period; storms at sea or delayed trains meant that these early banana salesmen would often open shipping crates full of rotten, unsellable fruit. But as advances in transportation and refrigeration shortened the time it took to bring bananas to market, they rose in popularity, cleverly marketed as a grocery staple, a fruit for the whole family.

However, the banana that people ate in the early 20th century was not the one we know today. There are hundreds of edible banana varieties, but to standardise production, banana companies selected a single type to grow: the Gros Michel, a large, flavourful banana. Gros Michel did well up until the 1950s. But then a fungus known as Fusarium wilt, or Panama disease, rapidly infected entire plantations, and caused a global collapse in the banana trade. The industry quickly found a replacement, a banana resistant to Panama disease, called the Cavendish. But while these new bananas were filling a growing Western appetite, Cavendish suffered from the same flaw that brought down Gros Michel: monoculture.

When a population lacks genetic diversity, its members have a heightened risk of succumbing to disease. Genetic mutation and variation allow some individuals the opportunity to develop immunity to pests or diseases. With bananas, that is basically impossible, because there is no genetic difference between them. Plantation bananas are sterile and produced via cloning; baby banana plants sprout from the base of adult banana plants, identicals in miniature of the adjacent giants they will soon become.

Staking the fate of a fruit on monoculture is dangerous in the extreme. It’s only a matter of time before some bug or fungus strikes, and many experts believe that strike is coming very soon. Already, plantations in Asia, Africa and elsewhere have been wiped out by a new strain of Panama known as Tropical Race 4. The disease is highly contagious, and in early 2018, further cases of TR4 were confirmed in Australia. Ecuador and Costa Rica, the largest banana exporters in the world, are one contaminated boot away from an epidemic. And unlike in the 1950s, there is no successor, no banana variety that lives up to the taste, transportability and ability to grow in monoculture. With no variety to take its place, the banana as we know it could be commercially defunct.

Perhaps most terrifyingly, this problem isn’t limited to bananas. The same way bananas are facing an epidemic, so is agriculture at large. Our focus on growing food in homogeneous blocks of land, as if they were giant outdoor manufacturing plants, is a natural process with nature taken out of the equation. And while there are many who believe in the power of technology to help put food on our tables, it is perhaps far past time we started to question the assumption that this is the only way to feed the world.

It would be nice to think that the large corporations who own the plantations producing bananas are looking into new systems and considering intercropping, organic methods or agroforestry – but they aren’t. The same economies of scale that promoted monoculture fit hand-in-glove with exploited labour, environmental degradation, and excessive amounts of pesticides. At the plantation in Costa Rica, I often asked workers about their families, and several of the men gave a heavy sigh, saying that they had no children. It was only later that I discovered many chemicals historically used in the banana industry are believed to cause sterility in men (indisputable connections between illness and chemical spraying are difficult to prove statistically). I never once saw a worker carrying a sprayer backpack with anything more than a handkerchief over his mouth.

For the consumer, a banana might cost only a few cents or pence, but the full cost of that perfect yellow fruit is extracted elsewhere – from workers, from the environment, and from the future stability of our agriculture. Instead, we might consider banana producers all over the world who are growing alternative (and delicious) varieties, and producing dried bananas, banana puree, and banana vinegar. Many of these smaller producers are growing in sustainable ways, paying fair wages and protecting their environment by using few or no agrochemicals. Their biggest barrier to the market is that they cannot compete with giants such as the Swiss-owned Chiquita and the US-owned Dole. If consumers adjust expectations and demand different banana products and varieties, this could prompt better agricultural practices across the industry as a whole, and create a more secure food future. As things stand, it is time to admit we don’t pay enough for bananas.

[Incredulity 11156]

that article from Mother Jones or what?

[CHIEF 5039]

CHIEF

[babysdaddy 2708]

44 minutes ago, Bevo said:

Bananas Have Died Out Once Before

 

Modern bananas are a monoculture. It’s only a matter of time before some bug or fungus strikes, and many experts believe that strike is coming very soon.

 

 

You probably take bananas for granted. In the United Kingdom, one in four pieces of fruit consumed is a banana and, on average, each Briton eats 10 kg of bananas per year; in the United States, that’s 12 kg, or up to 100 bananas. When I ask people, most seem to think bananas grow on trees. But they don’t, in either the literal or the figurative sense: in fact, they’re in danger of extinction.

I knew almost nothing about bananas when I landed in Costa Rica in 2011. I was a young scientist from the University of Michigan on a scholarship to study abroad, with fantasies of trapping and identifying tropical fish in pristine rainforest streams. But the institute I was enrolled at brought us to a banana plantation, and from the moment I set foot on the dense, dark clay beneath that endless green canopy, my fish fantasy evaporated. I became fascinated by the fruit I found growing on large, towering herbs, lined up in rows in their tens of thousands.

Bananas are one of the oldest known cultivated plants, but were first grown in the United States in the 1880s, by entrepreneurs involved in early plantations in Jamaica. This new fruit was odd-looking, originally with seeds, and would grow only in very particular tropical climates. For years, the fruit was an unreliable product due to its short ripening period; storms at sea or delayed trains meant that these early banana salesmen would often open shipping crates full of rotten, unsellable fruit. But as advances in transportation and refrigeration shortened the time it took to bring bananas to market, they rose in popularity, cleverly marketed as a grocery staple, a fruit for the whole family.

However, the banana that people ate in the early 20th century was not the one we know today. There are hundreds of edible banana varieties, but to standardise production, banana companies selected a single type to grow: the Gros Michel, a large, flavourful banana. Gros Michel did well up until the 1950s. But then a fungus known as Fusarium wilt, or Panama disease, rapidly infected entire plantations, and caused a global collapse in the banana trade. The industry quickly found a replacement, a banana resistant to Panama disease, called the Cavendish. But while these new bananas were filling a growing Western appetite, Cavendish suffered from the same flaw that brought down Gros Michel: monoculture.

When a population lacks genetic diversity, its members have a heightened risk of succumbing to disease. Genetic mutation and variation allow some individuals the opportunity to develop immunity to pests or diseases. With bananas, that is basically impossible, because there is no genetic difference between them. Plantation bananas are sterile and produced via cloning; baby banana plants sprout from the base of adult banana plants, identicals in miniature of the adjacent giants they will soon become.

Staking the fate of a fruit on monoculture is dangerous in the extreme. It’s only a matter of time before some bug or fungus strikes, and many experts believe that strike is coming very soon. Already, plantations in Asia, Africa and elsewhere have been wiped out by a new strain of Panama known as Tropical Race 4. The disease is highly contagious, and in early 2018, further cases of TR4 were confirmed in Australia. Ecuador and Costa Rica, the largest banana exporters in the world, are one contaminated boot away from an epidemic. And unlike in the 1950s, there is no successor, no banana variety that lives up to the taste, transportability and ability to grow in monoculture. With no variety to take its place, the banana as we know it could be commercially defunct.

Perhaps most terrifyingly, this problem isn’t limited to bananas. The same way bananas are facing an epidemic, so is agriculture at large. Our focus on growing food in homogeneous blocks of land, as if they were giant outdoor manufacturing plants, is a natural process with nature taken out of the equation. And while there are many who believe in the power of technology to help put food on our tables, it is perhaps far past time we started to question the assumption that this is the only way to feed the world.

It would be nice to think that the large corporations who own the plantations producing bananas are looking into new systems and considering intercropping, organic methods or agroforestry – but they aren’t. The same economies of scale that promoted monoculture fit hand-in-glove with exploited labour, environmental degradation, and excessive amounts of pesticides. At the plantation in Costa Rica, I often asked workers about their families, and several of the men gave a heavy sigh, saying that they had no children. It was only later that I discovered many chemicals historically used in the banana industry are believed to cause sterility in men (indisputable connections between illness and chemical spraying are difficult to prove statistically). I never once saw a worker carrying a sprayer backpack with anything more than a handkerchief over his mouth.

For the consumer, a banana might cost only a few cents or pence, but the full cost of that perfect yellow fruit is extracted elsewhere – from workers, from the environment, and from the future stability of our agriculture. Instead, we might consider banana producers all over the world who are growing alternative (and delicious) varieties, and producing dried bananas, banana puree, and banana vinegar. Many of these smaller producers are growing in sustainable ways, paying fair wages and protecting their environment by using few or no agrochemicals. Their biggest barrier to the market is that they cannot compete with giants such as the Swiss-owned Chiquita and the US-owned Dole. If consumers adjust expectations and demand different banana products and varieties, this could prompt better agricultural practices across the industry as a whole, and create a more secure food future. As things stand, it is time to admit we don’t pay enough for bananas.

[babysdaddy 2708]

Also, I'm supposed to go to Peru on Monday.  Should I cancel?

[hornmpa96 2535]

No CR - all this talk about inflation in food prices makes me wonder about the renewable fuel standards - food probably wouldn’t be as expensive if 33% of our corn harvest wasn’t used for fuel 

[52-80 18978]

Cant believe Putin would hike prices on bananas too

[Immaculate Vibes 114]

15 minutes ago, babysdaddy said:

Also, I'm supposed to go to Peru on Monday.  Should I cancel?

Take some tasty snacks with you in your suitcase. You’ll be treated like a king there.  
 

You ever gotten a Bj for a bag of Doritos? You only live once. 

Edited April 12, 2022 by Immaculate Vibes

[babysdaddy 2708]

Just now, Immaculate Vibes said:

Take some tasty snacks with you in your suitcase. You’ll be treated like a king there.  
 

You ever gotten a Bj for a bag of Doritos? You only live once. 

I'm married so I could have $1 billion and I'm still not getting a BJ

[ztejas 42750]

6 hours ago, Pam Cummings said:

Lmao, have you gotten a clue yet? Still think VJ is a better golfer than Scottie?

I meant Penelope. My b.

[TexasEd 8014]

On 4/9/2022 at 2:01 PM, F250 said:

Things started going down hill in 2015 when Blue Bell was pulled from the shelves. The world never seemed right after that.

 

I blame aggy

[InkaUtexas 24915]

Another place to watch. Malian's are acting quite tough lately vs. the west. 

 

[Immaculate Vibes 114]

On 4/9/2022 at 10:53 PM, Immaculate Vibes said:

 

 

[atomheartbevo 88841]

6 hours ago, babysdaddy said:

I'm married so I could have $1 billion and I'm still not getting a BJ

[Bevo Num1 1003]

Another place to watch. Malian's are acting quite tough lately vs. the west. 
 

Mali is going to FAFO.

[Macanudo 12674]

1 minute ago, Bevo Num1 said:

3 hours ago, InkaUtexas said:

Another place to watch. Malian's are acting quite tough lately vs. the west. 
 

Mali is going to FAFO.

From who?

[InkaUtexas 24915]

9 minutes ago, Macanudo said:

From who?

Mainly the French and partnering up with Russia and Wagner in particular. This does not get a lot of coverage. 

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-60997602

Harrowing accounts are emerging of Malian troops and suspected Russian mercenaries allegedly executing about 300 people in central Mali.

Residents told Human Rights Watch (HRW) that the killings took place during an operation against militant Islamists over four days in late March. 

Detained men were ordered to walk in groups of up to 10, before being summarily executed, HRW said.

"I lived in terror, each minute, each second thinking it would be my turn to be taken away and executed. Even after being told to go, I feared it was a trap," one man who witnessed some executions was quoted as saying. 

"As I walked away, slowly, I held my hand on my chest, holding my breath, and waiting for a bullet to pass through my body," he added. 

Mali's military admitted on Saturday that it had killed more than 200 militants in a "large-scale" assault on the "terrorist fief" of Moura.

[Macanudo 12674]

Except that the French have been scaling back their African ops.

[InkaUtexas 24915]

1 minute ago, Macanudo said:

Except that the French have been scaling back their African ops.

Yes, in exchange for a larger EU presence and Peacekeepers. Talking with an expert tomorrow. Will see what I can gather from him. 

[F250 28419]

9 hours ago, hornmpa96 said:

No CR - all this talk about inflation in food prices makes me wonder about the renewable fuel standards - food probably wouldn’t be as expensive if 33% of our corn harvest wasn’t used for fuel 

The Midwest looking at you right now.

 

[Parliament 13993]

We need to take some heat off of corn demand, and dropping the ethanol mandate will do that.  Many of my farmer friends believe this.

[F250 28419]

1 hour ago, Parliament said:

We need to take some heat off of corn demand, and dropping the ethanol mandate will do that.  Many of my farmer friends believe this.

Are your farmer friends in Iowa because that's where most of the defense of ethanol is occurring?

 

[WBT 20144]

Don't blame me, I voted for MTBE

[Superhero 8588]

16 hours ago, Bevo said:

Bananas Have Died Out Once Before

 

Modern bananas are a monoculture. It’s only a matter of time before some bug or fungus strikes, and many experts believe that strike is coming very soon.

 

 

You probably take bananas for granted. In the United Kingdom, one in four pieces of fruit consumed is a banana and, on average, each Briton eats 10 kg of bananas per year; in the United States, that’s 12 kg, or up to 100 bananas. When I ask people, most seem to think bananas grow on trees. But they don’t, in either the literal or the figurative sense: in fact, they’re in danger of extinction.

I knew almost nothing about bananas when I landed in Costa Rica in 2011. I was a young scientist from the University of Michigan on a scholarship to study abroad, with fantasies of trapping and identifying tropical fish in pristine rainforest streams. But the institute I was enrolled at brought us to a banana plantation, and from the moment I set foot on the dense, dark clay beneath that endless green canopy, my fish fantasy evaporated. I became fascinated by the fruit I found growing on large, towering herbs, lined up in rows in their tens of thousands.

Bananas are one of the oldest known cultivated plants, but were first grown in the United States in the 1880s, by entrepreneurs involved in early plantations in Jamaica. This new fruit was odd-looking, originally with seeds, and would grow only in very particular tropical climates. For years, the fruit was an unreliable product due to its short ripening period; storms at sea or delayed trains meant that these early banana salesmen would often open shipping crates full of rotten, unsellable fruit. But as advances in transportation and refrigeration shortened the time it took to bring bananas to market, they rose in popularity, cleverly marketed as a grocery staple, a fruit for the whole family.

However, the banana that people ate in the early 20th century was not the one we know today. There are hundreds of edible banana varieties, but to standardise production, banana companies selected a single type to grow: the Gros Michel, a large, flavourful banana. Gros Michel did well up until the 1950s. But then a fungus known as Fusarium wilt, or Panama disease, rapidly infected entire plantations, and caused a global collapse in the banana trade. The industry quickly found a replacement, a banana resistant to Panama disease, called the Cavendish. But while these new bananas were filling a growing Western appetite, Cavendish suffered from the same flaw that brought down Gros Michel: monoculture.

When a population lacks genetic diversity, its members have a heightened risk of succumbing to disease. Genetic mutation and variation allow some individuals the opportunity to develop immunity to pests or diseases. With bananas, that is basically impossible, because there is no genetic difference between them. Plantation bananas are sterile and produced via cloning; baby banana plants sprout from the base of adult banana plants, identicals in miniature of the adjacent giants they will soon become.

Staking the fate of a fruit on monoculture is dangerous in the extreme. It’s only a matter of time before some bug or fungus strikes, and many experts believe that strike is coming very soon. Already, plantations in Asia, Africa and elsewhere have been wiped out by a new strain of Panama known as Tropical Race 4. The disease is highly contagious, and in early 2018, further cases of TR4 were confirmed in Australia. Ecuador and Costa Rica, the largest banana exporters in the world, are one contaminated boot away from an epidemic. And unlike in the 1950s, there is no successor, no banana variety that lives up to the taste, transportability and ability to grow in monoculture. With no variety to take its place, the banana as we know it could be commercially defunct.

Perhaps most terrifyingly, this problem isn’t limited to bananas. The same way bananas are facing an epidemic, so is agriculture at large. Our focus on growing food in homogeneous blocks of land, as if they were giant outdoor manufacturing plants, is a natural process with nature taken out of the equation. And while there are many who believe in the power of technology to help put food on our tables, it is perhaps far past time we started to question the assumption that this is the only way to feed the world.

It would be nice to think that the large corporations who own the plantations producing bananas are looking into new systems and considering intercropping, organic methods or agroforestry – but they aren’t. The same economies of scale that promoted monoculture fit hand-in-glove with exploited labour, environmental degradation, and excessive amounts of pesticides. At the plantation in Costa Rica, I often asked workers about their families, and several of the men gave a heavy sigh, saying that they had no children. It was only later that I discovered many chemicals historically used in the banana industry are believed to cause sterility in men (indisputable connections between illness and chemical spraying are difficult to prove statistically). I never once saw a worker carrying a sprayer backpack with anything more than a handkerchief over his mouth.

For the consumer, a banana might cost only a few cents or pence, but the full cost of that perfect yellow fruit is extracted elsewhere – from workers, from the environment, and from the future stability of our agriculture. Instead, we might consider banana producers all over the world who are growing alternative (and delicious) varieties, and producing dried bananas, banana puree, and banana vinegar. Many of these smaller producers are growing in sustainable ways, paying fair wages and protecting their environment by using few or no agrochemicals. Their biggest barrier to the market is that they cannot compete with giants such as the Swiss-owned Chiquita and the US-owned Dole. If consumers adjust expectations and demand different banana products and varieties, this could prompt better agricultural practices across the industry as a whole, and create a more secure food future. As things stand, it is time to admit we don’t pay enough for bananas.

Will this lead to the great banana famine of 2025? Will the US be inundated by immigrants looking for other sources of potassium?

I jest. There was an NPR podcast with the same story. The Aussies are using CRSPR technology to genetically alter the Cavendish banana to be more resistant to the fungus.

Or maybe we’ll just start farming and eating another type of banana that will be even less tasty but more transportable. 
 

15 hours ago, babysdaddy said:

I'm married so I could have $1 billion and I'm still not getting a BJ

Yes you could. $1 billion would buy a lot of toe curling blowjobs, and more importantly, secrecy.

Or you could’ve just married a woman who doesn’t mind blowing you from time to time. I guess I got lucky. 

[Parliament 13993]

7 hours ago, F250 said:

Are your farmer friends in Iowa because that's where most of the defense of ethanol is occurring?

 

No, but with respect to the egos of Iowa farmers, guys in other States raise corn too.

[quote]  Or you could’ve just married a woman who doesn’t mind blowing you from time to time. I guess I got lucky. [/quote]

Dude, we're all luck she gives BJ's.

Edited April 13, 2022 by Parliament

[F250 28419]

1 hour ago, Parliament said:

No, but with respect to the egos of Iowa farmers, guys in other States raise corn too.

Some states have oil & gas, other states have major economic hubs but Iowa just has fucking corn. That's why they will go to the mat to defend the blended fuel requirements. It's the same with Nebraska.

[Parliament 13993]

Also cows and soybeans, but your point stands.

[Serak The Preparer 3408]

9 minutes ago, Parliament said:

Also cows and soybeans, but your point stands.

Ah yes - the famous Iowa Beef Industry. 

[kevwun 15223]

Ever heard of IBP?  Before Tyson bought them, the name stood for Iowa Beef Processors.

Edited April 13, 2022 by kevwun

[babysdaddy 2708]

6 hours ago, Superhero said:

Yes you could. $1 billion would buy a lot of toe curling blowjobs, and more importantly, secrecy.

Or you could’ve just married a woman who doesn’t mind blowing you from time to time. I guess I got lucky. 

[Serak The Preparer 3408]

9 minutes ago, kevwun said:

Ever heard of IBP?  Before Tyson bought them, the name stood for Iowa Beef Processors.

How many people think of cows before pigs when it comes to Iowa ag contributions? Maybe I have a different perspective because I lived in Iowa for many years but pork was much more common a topic of conversation than beef. Just a little ribbing at @Parliament for mentioning cows.

[CHIEF 5039]

2 hours ago, F250 said:

Some states have oil & gas, other states have major economic hubs but Iowa just has fucking corn. That's why they will go to the mat to defend the blended fuel requirements. It's the same with Nebraska.

With commodity prices through the roof already, and a World possibly on the brink of a mass starvation event, ethanol production should be shelved. I know it's feeder corn, and not sweet corn, in the fields, at this moment, but whatever percentage of the acreage of corn that is put into ethanol, at this time, should be sown with food crops. Rainfall and yield would be impossible to calculate, but keeping people alive should trump shitty gas.

CHIEF

Edited April 13, 2022 by CHIEF

[F250 28419]

30 minutes ago, CHIEF said:

With commodity prices through the roof already, and a World possibly on the brink of a mass starvation event, ethanol production should be shelved. I know it's feeder corn, and not sweet corn, in the fields, at this moment, but whatever percentage of the acreage of corn that is put into ethanol, at this time, should be sown with food crops. Rainfall and yield would be impossible to calculate, but keeping people alive should trump shitty gas.

CHIEF

The reality is every state will put their self interest above the nation and the rest of the world.

 

[Immaculate Vibes 114]

No paywall here. 
 

https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/yellen-plans-global-food-crisis-160616360.html?guccounter=1

 

Speaking in a question-and-answer session after her Atlantic Council speech, Yellen said “this will be an urgent concern for us next week to try and think about how we can stave off starvation around the world.”

[bolverk 28976]

4 hours ago, CHIEF said:

With commodity prices through the roof already, and a World possibly on the brink of a mass starvation event, ethanol production should be shelved. I know it's feeder corn, and not sweet corn, in the fields, at this moment, but whatever percentage of the acreage of corn that is put into ethanol, at this time, should be sown with food crops. Rainfall and yield would be impossible to calculate, but keeping people alive should trump shitty gas.

CHIEF

THIS

3 hours ago, F250 said:

The reality is every state will put their self interest above the nation and the rest of the world.

 

but also THIS

[atomheartbevo 88841]

9 hours ago, Immaculate Vibes said:

https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/yellen-plans-global-food-crisis-160616360.html?guccounter=1

Speaking in a question-and-answer session after her Atlantic Council speech, Yellen said “this will be an urgent concern for us next week to try and think about how we can stave off starvation around the world.”

Peter Zeihan: