Sweet Corn

We had the best sweet corn yet for supper tonight. Our son called and said as he traveled from Springfield, Mo. to Iowa, he saw corn fields so dried up from lack of rain that they looked like they do in the fall when they are ready to pick. That is a real shame. Much corn is going into Ethanol and into gas tanks and I hope they never find that they are short of food all over using it this way. I think it is foolish. Drill baby, drill. We have enough oil in the USA if the NUTS would shutup that we could be selling our oil to other companies instead of letting them hold us up for oil. What happened to common sense. It seems to have flown the coop.

What is Your Next Car?

What kind of car are you going to get next. Do you want one that takes the new E85? Or are you thinking of an electric car? That would be ok if you don't have to travel long distances. We have a Pontiac Bonneville and we use ethanol in it. We always have and we seem to get along fine with it. It is unleaded gas with corn oil blended in with it or something like that. I am not much of an expert on that but I know they are building plants all around us to make alternative gasolines out of both beans and corn. The one problem seems to be that it is raising the grocery prices out of site so I am not sure we are gaining anything at all as the gas prices are also going up.

Biotech Launches "Third Wave"

Biotechnology was first applied in medicine and then in farming. There are dozens of life-saving drugs on the market and many crops are genetically engineered to withstand weed killers today. Now the push to develop alternative fuels is driving biotechnology's growth into the industrial sector. After decades, energy companies may finally be able to produce ethanol easily and inexpensively thanks to breakthroughs in biotechnology. The Canadian biotech company Iogen Corp. has developed a method of deriving ethanol from a variety of plants including wheat, oats and barley. They are also working on converting the cellulose in crop waste, wood chips and other plants into ethanol. The billionaire co-founder of Sun Microsystems Inc. is investing hundreds of millions of dollars in green technology and will be a featured speaker this year at the World Congress on Industrial Biotechnology & Bioprocessing. Believe it or not, oil companies are also investing heavily in biotechnology these days. That is great.