Wojtek
> Morning all,
> I saw the USDA figures for last year and Americans ate a
> record 219 pounds of meat per capita or around 62 billion
> pounds of meat. What was interesting is if you compare these
> to the year 1960 and you find that we are eating 14% LESS
> pork (by weight per capita) and only 6% more beef than we did
> 40 years ago. Chicken on the other hand increased 240% and
> they did not release the figures of the other meats in this
> comparison study of the "big three". To produce a pound of
> meat on an animal it takes over 4 pounds of grain so we fed
> around 800 pounds of grain per capita to livestock.
>
> You might not be aware but 2002 worldwide was a disastrous
> row crop year on average and will be the third year in a row
> where we did not produce enough grain worldwide to continue
> feeding livestock "cheap" grain AND feed the exploding human
> population. Australia is protesting the delivery of American
> BT corn into their country this morning to feed their egg
> laying hens. For only the fourth time since World War II are
> they importing grain this week because of the severe droughts
> and hot winters they have had for the last three years. If
> you want corn anywhere in the world this week you MUST buy
> American BT corn because all other non BT corn is already
> contracted out.
>
> High grain prices are bringing fringe farm land in the US
> (that which normally cannot produce enough grain to justify
> plowing) back into production for this coming year. The USDA
> estimates that to replenish our low stockpiles of grain we
> need to add another 13 million "quality" farmland acres to
> the 900 million acres we tilled last year. This is "new land"
> or fallow land, that which was not tilled last year and is
> equal to a strip of land 20 miles wide from the gulf of
> Mexico to Chicago.
>
> Do you think environmentalists would get upset if Exxon said
> they needed 13 million acres in the center of our country to
> build a trans-America pipeline and were going to bulldoze
> every bush, tree and blade of grass , then spray herbicides
> on it to "prevent" plant species diversification and dump
> nitrates and phosphates on it to promote only 8 different
> species of plants (all of them different forms of grass) AND
> then spray these acres with pesticides to prevent insect
> diversification?
>
> The thing I found horrifying about the USDA spokesman's quote
> was that 2003 was going to be a GREAT test so see how much
> farmland is left in the US. He mentioned the record number of
> farm bankruptcies, skyrocketing farm equipment costs and loss
> of acres to other uses. He basically said that with the high
> prices predicted due to poor production across the southern
> hemisphere that we were going to see exactly how many acres
> the US could put into production on a one year notice with
> our current farm equipment and manpower and the land that was
> available to them and the loans they are able to secure for
> seed and fertilizer.
>
> To help out farmers, the large European farm equipment
> manufacturers have implemented a radical new program in the
> US to get tractors and plows off their lots. Farmers now no
> longer have to buy equipment (many have ruined
> credit) and can lease equipment by the HOUR to enable them to
> put their fallow land back into production. They now only
> have to get loan credit for the hours used.
>
> The world is a tiny, fragile globe when hungry laying hens in
> Australia have my friends in Louisiana changing their crop
> and them plowing for 40 straight hours this past weekend
> during a sleet and snow storm to row up their land to produce
> corn to replace the Australian failed summer crop of corn
> half a world away.....EVERY human on this planet is a
> consumer, EVERY person is responsible for the land plowed to
> feed us, and every tree cut down to shelter us, every drop of
> pollution created to give us the lifestyle we live in. Keith Kridler
>