Though if truth be told I thought that was what I'd been doing in writing letters to the editor all these years…

I thought my first blog would be on education but surprise it's on food, fuel, and economy. A letter to the editor caught my interest on reader's reasoning behind soaring food prices. She indicated that it wasn't ethanol production that was raising food prices but was transportation costs to the table and increasing demand. Well she's right that those are two causes for rise in food prices, BUT…it IS all connected.

Ethanol production from corn still is not a viable answer to help our fuel situation. Producing corn demands that we use diesel tractors and petroleum based fertilizers to grow it. That just doesn't make sense ecologically nor does it reduce our demand effectively. It just wasn't a well thought out solution and is just going to be a band aid over a bigger problem. To lower fuel prices we need to lower our demand for petroleum products and rethink both the way we think about transportation and food. Yes use food that is produced closer to home and not demand strawberries from Argentina in January, but use food that doesn't use up so much petroleum in its actual production as well. Seek out farmers who produce grass fed beef, lamb, eggs, and milk and tilt the balance back from using the non reusable resources so much to using the grasses who photosynthesize their energy from the sun, our best renewable resource, letting the livestock harvest them and fertilize them simultaneously.

This rush to produce the much in demand corn has caused more farmers to plow up their hay fields, destroying yet another patch of established sod that they will soon have to use more petroleum based fertilizers on as its nutrients get stripped to support the corn plant. The livestock raisers lean more and more towards feeding corn as hay prices soar and that will feed the ever stronger dependency for our petroleum through more corn feeding.

Times are a changing. May be better to go back to a more diverse farming method where the diverse livestock population will be leaned on again for fertilizer resource and less corn is grown so we can maintain nutrients in the land without so much of the petroleum fertilizers and fuel to obtain our food. In the mean time we need to continue to develop sources for ethanol that use the sun energy and not rely even indirectly so much on petroleum products and continued depletion of the soil as whether we run out of oil in 50 years or 500, we will run out and we had better be prepared to live by alternative means when we get to that point.