"Lots of grain left over as fall harvest begins"

Sioux Falls (AP) -- The fall harvest will contribute to already huge stockpiles of grain from previous record of near-record harvests.

A report from the Agricultural Statistics Service shows the Sept. 1 inventory of soybean, corn and wheat in the state at near-record levels, while oats and barley are down.

Alan May, grain marketing specialist at South Dakota State University, said the huge amount of grain stocks is a result of several years of excellent production nationwide.

Depending on the size of this year's harvest, those stocks are expected to grow as international markets remain stagnant for US exports.

That could mean continued lower prices for farmers, May said.

With a record soybean harvest being predicted for South Dakota this year, soybean stocks, at 15.9 million bushels, were up 86 percent from a year ago.

These are the largest Sept. 1 stocks on record, according to the report. On-farm stocks represented 69 percent of the total.

Soybean carryover could amount to more than 400 million bushels, May said.

"That is a lot of soybeans, and for us to see any real significant improvement in price on beans is not in the cards for quite some time, either," he said.

All wheat stocks in SOuth Dakota, at 133.6 million bushels, were up 21 percent from last year. It was the third-largest September stocks on record.

Corn stocks totaled 76.2 million bushels, up 54 percent from last year and down 40 percent from the Sept. 1, 1987, record.

May said the amount of corn carried over to the next marketing year could be close to 2 billion bushels, depending on how much corn is harvested this fall.

"That will be a pretty tough pressure point on corn when it comes to price," he said. "If we see this stock position get higher and pressure prices, undoubtedly we will see more corn being put into storage.

-- S. Kohl (kohl@hcpd.com), October 07, 1999

Answers

Who said it was???

-- Vernon Hale (create@premiernet.net), October 07, 1999.

Too bad our gubmint hasn't seen fit to buy some of it and get it distributed out into towns where the people of this country can utilize it!!! I guess they are going to wait until after Jan 1 and the trains slow down, and try and crowd it in cars between the coal cars.

Taz

-- Taz (Taz@aol.com), October 07, 1999.

As we drive along roads, we see huge stockpiles of grain. We talk to farmers who are holding their stocks, hoping for better prices. So the article above matches the evidence we can see personally.

To put these stocks' significance in perspective, a person could live on two bushels of wheat for a year, although his diet would not be balanced. So the 133.6 million bushels of wheat in this state alone provides enough calories to keep 66.8 million of the 280 million population in the US alive--and that is adults. Children don't need as much (and they don't do as well on wheat either). We'd still have the corn and soybeans, and all the food production of other states to call on.

So for those who maintain that overpopulation is a problem even in the US, and food shortages are imminent even without Y2K disruption, what is the source of your facts? I've been hearing that kind of thing since I was in grade school, and the evidence I've seen as I've gotten older just doesn't match what I was taught.

I know that many people realize that delivery, not production, of food is the issue for Y2K, at least for the first year. But I keep hearing about how we've already got food shortages because of overpopulation, and I am at a loss as to how that conclusion could be reached.

-- S. Kohl (kohl@hcpd.com), October 07, 1999.

Dear Senator Kohl: But what about my Twinkies?

-- (corny@kansas.feed), October 07, 1999.

There's always been enough food to feed the hungry just as there's always been famine.Irony is the true all powerful force in the universe.

-- zoobie (zoobiezoob@yahoo.com), October 07, 1999.

Food is a pipeline issue. There's lots in the storehouses, silos, etc. But if we have problems in Y2k we won't be able to move it to the processor or the canner, then to the bulk-breakers, then to the grocery warehouses, then to the stores.

Buy it all as best you can, pump it through the pipeline into your pantries. It's not the total quantity that counts, it's where it's sitting.

-- bw (home@puget.sound), October 07, 1999.

Impressive numbers. But we have all seen these kind of numbers change form plus to minus and visa versa over night depending what the market manipulators want.

You say we will have 400,000,000 bushels of soybean carryover. Divided 270,000,000 american people in to that equals 1.5 bushel apiece and that does not consider what we export.

I know you can argue this, but if the system goes down the trucks stop and the manufacturing ceases (I don't care how full the bins are even to bursting the seams) it equals starvation for many.

-- Lyle (eileen@idacom.net), October 07, 1999.

...nor do any of these figures being thrown around account for the amount of grain fed to livestock.

-- Lilly (homesteader145@yahoo.com), October 07, 1999.

http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=000pdT

Nobel Prize Economics 1998 : Causes of Famine

greenspun.com : LUSENET : TimeBomb 2000 (Y2000) : One Thread

Amartya Sen of India was awarded the 1998 Nobel Prize for Economics for exploring the 'allocation of resources' within societies.

Example: Bangladesh Famine 1974

A record crop harvest in this year not exceeded for the years 1971 through 1976.

Problem: Northern Bangladesh ruined by floods. Workers unable to earn a living. Famine resulted from the inability of the lowest earners to buy food; also because of hoarding and speculative withholding of food for profit.

Notice that the problem was one of the division of labor. A large increase in unemployment of people who had no assets to fall back on plunged these people into famine. (I am looking at a photograph of emaciated women and children as I type this.)

NOT THE LACK OF FOOD. The lack of employment and the lack of savings.

~~~~~

Think about the Great Depression in the USA. Farmers were going bancrupt because of a crash in commodity prices, people were unemployed and everyone was so afraid of losing their remaining assets that they all stopped buying non-essentials. People went hungry here, folks. It was for the same reason that Bangladesh went hungry.

The same things are staring us in the face with regard to Y2K. Its not the availablity of food that is the determining factor .. it is the level of unemployment.

We are heading there. We are also in danger of losing other portions of the infrastructure which enable us to eat food produced hundreds and thousands of miles from our own stomachs. This multiplies the risk.

Risk. Risk avoidance strategies. Insurance. Its about seeing what may come and being prepared for it. (And remember others as well. They are you neighbors.)

-- David (C.D@I.N), May 14, 1999

-- Old Git (anon@spamproblems.com), October 07, 1999.

A lot of the grain is fed to livestock, that's true. But that livestock can be used for meat, if there is a shortage of food, and I would hope that if human beings were starving in this country that livestock such as cows would not be preferentially fed the grain.

So I count all of the grain as available for human beings in an emergency, because I value human life above animal life. And that is the way it should be, whether it played out that way in a time of trouble or not.

-- S. Kohl (kohl@hcpd.com), October 07, 1999.

Unfortunately, S. Kohl, it probably wouldn't work that way. If a beef packer or feedlot operator could get the grain, it would be fed to the cattle over people. There is no federal-level agency with the foresight or the high-level view, who has the chutzpah to shut down feedlots in this situation, in order to use grains more efficiently.

The feedlot operator would holler bloody murder, claim he was feeding the starving masses, etc, and would be making substantial cash/food contributions to that agency at the same time. The source of grain wouldn't care - he's getting his price regardless who eats it. And the people wouldn't realize what was happening, any more than most people recognized the danger in the huge NC hog operations.

Business as usual may cause famine, next year, but that danger is not enough, by itself, to preclude business as usual.

-- bw (home@puget.sound), October 07, 1999.

NO ONE EVER SAID THERE IS A FOOD SHORTAGE. The problem is distribution. Supply chain. Oil, trucking, and the grocery stores. It's possible that the government could intervene, seize supply from the farmers and distribute the food. If they can do so tacticly and have the fuel to truck it into the cities in an edible form. They can't just give people wheat without water and fire to cook.

-- Mara Wayne (MaraWayne@aol.com), October 07, 1999.

Most people wouldn't know what to do with a sack of wheat or a bag of soybeans if you handed it to them. We live in an age of fast food and processed food--stick it in the microwave and whoof it down. People are going to be highly pissed when the burgers, fries and shakes are gone, yep, highly pissed.

-- bardou (bardou@baloney.com), October 07, 1999.

S Kohl,

Please read the board before you ask a question and then want to argue about the answer.

In a thread below, Food industry, Koskinen withholding information, the following comment was made concerning the Washington, DC food bank:

"1. Our discussion on June 14, 1999 with the wonderful staff at the local, utterly crucial DC Food Bank serving 200,000 people, was seemingly the first serious one they had had on Y2K. They asked us for concrete advice on what they should be doing to assure continued service to their vulnerable populations. It was clear that they had thought of Y2K, as many tend to do initially, mainly in terms of the possibility of doing new food drives and of the vulnerabilities of their own internal systems for computerized tracking, etc. They had not thought in terms of larger infrastructure failures that could impact their lighting, refrigeration, transportation, etc. to the point of making food bank operations impossible......"

[Begin rant!!!!!]

Now, read that again. It does not mention food shortages in the field. What it discusses is a food shortage in the cities, especially in operations such as major food banks that supply so many of our urban poor.

Read it again. And again. Then maybe it will soak in that food shortages don't depend solely on the amount of food in the field and the number of people that it must be distributed to. It will rot in the field unless there is a way to get it to the cites.

Try reading it again.

Did you get your answer?

The first postwas a question. The second post was an argument. Don't ask a question if you've predetermined that you're going to argue about the answer, troll.

[Rant off.]

-- angry with trolls (that@can't.read), October 07, 1999.

A genuinely comical thread. There will be food shortages, repeat after me until hypnotized. There WILL be food shortages.

But wait, we have lots of food. We had a bumper crop. Oops, HOW can we rectify this fact with our convictions?

Well, transportation, that's it! Trucking will fail. Any evidence for this? No, but who needs it. But failing that, processing will fail. Any evidence? Shaddup, dont need no steeking evidence.

And finally the clincher -- if a bunch of unlikely things happen, the DC food bank will be nonfunctional. OK, any evidence that those unlikely things will happen? Well, even if they don't, they will.

Rule 1: There WILL be a food shortage

Rule 2: When there won't be a food shortage, see rule 1.

This is about the first straight fact-posting 'troll' since Norm gave up in disgust.

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), October 07, 1999.

Flint, all people on this thread are saying is that food shortages are POSSIBLE, and that not to prepare for this POSSIBILITY is foolish. That's it. That's all they're saying. You try to make an argument out of everything. Chill out.

-- C'mon Flint (noway@notachance.com), October 08, 1999.

Flint, is it true you have some food stashed? If so, why?

-- Old Git (anon@spamproblems.com), October 08, 1999.

If you think about it, we don't have a shortage of water, either. As for >>drinkable<< water, that's another thing.

-- Tim (pixmo@pixelquest.com), October 08, 1999.

"NO ONE EVER SAID THERE IS A FOOD SHORTAGE."

-- Mara Wayne

This idea is a main postulate of advocates of population control (some of whom look to Y2K to rectify the ecological imbalance caused by "too many people"). My father is also influenced by people holding to this idea. So I know some of what they have said and are saying.

And I recall reading a little something on the subject in a thread on this site, I believe. On why most people shouldn't have many kids, or something? Could be from a different site--it was a while ago, and I thought it was this site.

I also was heavily indoctrinated in public education in this regard, believe me! Being deliberately misled makes me a little fractious when I later discover the truth. Just as bacteria in a test tube multiply exponentially until they suddenly exceed the capacity of their environment to support life and the population crashes...so will it go with humanity!!! Uh, except that humans are not bacteria, are they? False analogy. But the wise and learned have been wrong before on other things even in my lifetime--economics isn't a zero sum game, either.

-- S. Kohl (kohl@hcpd.com), October 08, 1999.

"Most people wouldn't know what to do with a sack of wheat or a bag of soybeans if you handed it to them."

-- bardou (bardou@baloney.com), October 07, 1999.

You can just boil it to soften it, and then chew it up I would guess. Kids have more difficulty, but that's why mothers used to chew up their food for them. Of course moms also nursed until till their child could handle the coarse food available.

I have heard one story from a couple people who experienced famine in Africa, too. They ate whatever MIGHT have nutritive value, including tree bark, unidentified plants, and boiled shoe leather--so I would think by the time they were beginning to starve that most people, barring mental illness, would figure out something to try with the grain/beans.

In a volunteer starvation study I read about once, people's focus shifted so that even when they watched normal movies, they automatically fixated on what was eaten instead of whatever dramatic events were taking place, and in fact that was almost all they noticed. Their favorite topic also became recipes and menus.

If a food shortage happened in real life, I suspect that this focus would help people figure out what to do with bags of grain. A week without food is nothing, for most adults (the initial weakness from fasting is just the transition to a different metabolic path, from what I understand). Starvation is more than just discomfort from fasting. Hardly any Americans comprehend what it would be--I only comprehend from the tales of others, yet I've gone without food for two weeks before (not directly by my own choice, but as a result of another choice I made).

-- S. Kohl (kohl@hcpd.com), October 08, 1999.

S Kohl,

Please read the board before you ask a question and then want to argue about the answer.

In a thread below, Food industry, Koskinen withholding information, the following comment was made concerning the Washington, DC food bank:

"1. Our discussion on June 14, 1999 with the wonderful staff at the local, utterly crucial DC Food Bank serving 200,000 people, was seemingly the first serious one they had had on Y2K. They asked us for concrete advice on what they should be doing to assure continued service to their vulnerable populations. It was clear that they had thought of Y2K, as many tend to do initially, mainly in terms of the possibility of doing new food drives and of the vulnerabilities of their own internal systems for computerized tracking, etc. They had not thought in terms of larger infrastructure failures that could impact their lighting, refrigeration, transportation, etc. to the point of making food bank operations impossible......"

[Begin rant!!!!!]

Now, read that again. It does not mention food shortages in the field. What it discusses is a food shortage in the cities, especially in operations such as major food banks that supply so many of our urban poor.

Read it again. And again. Then maybe it will soak in that food shortages don't depend solely on the amount of food in the field and the number of people that it must be distributed to. It will rot in the field unless there is a way to get it to the cites.

Try reading it again.

Did you get your answer?

The first postwas a question. The second post was an argument. Don't ask a question if you've predetermined that you're going to argue about the answer, troll.

<<(WELL, I will admit that I wasn't asking (rhetorical question, don't you know). I know the answer. I thought that was obvious, but hopefully this will clarify that I was never seeking enlightenment as to WHETHER there was a food shortage world wide, or not. There isn't. Human beings cause them, mostly, for nefarious purposes, and then we send relief that the same human beings sometimes make sure doesn't get there. Natural disasters also cause them, and sometimes just pure neglect and selfishness prevents those who could help from helping. And sometimes political manueverings put farmers out of business so starvation becomes the price of independence. Only occasionally is there famine that humans aren't purposefully responsible for in some way--IMHO)>>

[Rant off.]

-- angry with trolls (that@can't.read), October 07, 1999.

I'm so sorry you're feeling that way! Anger feels good while you're on the high, but the withdrawal can be painful.

Here's a non-rhetorical question: What makes you think that article is what I was discussing? Sorry I wasn't more clear.

If there is famine in this country, I think it will be because human intervention prevents food from getting to the people without it, or because those with the power choose to allocate resources to some private venture, preventing distribution from occuring.

Or are you really claiming that no trucks, no trains, and no animal transport will be working? People can live about two months with no food, and many in this country can no doubt go quite a bit longer :).

BTW, I'm prepared to personally see to the care of 25 people outside my own family. And I don't reject the possibility of an unidentified extra number, if things were really bad (nuclear war, a government coup...). How many are you prepared to take in? Not part of the selfishness equation, are you?

I don't really think a technological breakdown like Y2K alone could cause that big a problem with food, but I could see human selfishness, greed, and evil turning it into a disaster of escatological proportions.

-- S. Kohl (kohl@hcpd.com), October 08, 1999.

Old Git:

I really enjoyed the post on the real causes of famine! Thanks for posting it!

-- S. Kohl (kohl@hcpd.com), October 08, 1999.