The January 2007 report below is by December McSherry, Florida farmer, Florida Chapter of the Sierra Club Agriculture Chairwoman and National Sierra Club Agriculture Committee member.

More information on this topic can be read here:
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2007/2/1/8320/72156

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The ethanol craze has doubled grain prices at local country elevators.
Corn has hit decade highs - around $4 a bushel.

High grain prices also mean increased feeding costs, making it more
expensive to fatten livestock like cattle.

The livestock industry, strained by rising grain prices, has turned to the
poultry industry for a new feed source -  chicken manure.

Cows may be wintered on a mixture of 89% chicken manure and 20% ground corn

Guidelines for Feeding Broiler Litter to Beef Cattle
http://www.bae.ncsu.edu/programs/extension/publicat/wqwm/ ...

Tyson Foods, Inc. (NYSE: TSN), the world's largest poultry producer,
gave an Environmental Award at their Annual Shareholders Meeting to
Dennis and Ginger Stoneburner who raise 150,000 chickens at their Glen Hill
Farm in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia and feed 200 tons of chicken manure
to their 300 head of stocker cattle. They mix the remaining 630 tons of manure
with corn and sell it as bagged cattle feed.

Poultry farms in Arkansas produce 5,100 tons of manure each day.

Arkansas cattle producers looking at emergency feed options - News - August 2006
http://www.uaex.edu/news/august2006/0825litr.htm

Dr. Stephen Sundlof, FDA's director for the Center for Veterinary Medicine,
acknowledges, "adding chicken litter to cattle feed is one of the primary
methods of waste disposal for the chicken growers" in the Southeast.

FDA  is still struggling  to safeguard us against mad cow disease.

Just thought you would like to know about the symbiotic relationship
within Industrial Agriculture.  And disclose a cow's diet.

Ray Wallace touches upon the topic of a cows diet in U.S. feedlots in "The USA: Ethanol Supermarket to the World?"

See the April 2007 issue of Energy Tribune Magazine, Houston, Texas:
              http://www.energytribune.com/articles.cfm?aid=439

from Ray Wallace

     "I'm a big believer in ethanol.... We're going to run into a constraint
       pretty soon, though. It turns out corn is needed for more than just
       ethanol. You got to feed your cows and feed your hogs."

         -- From President George W. Bush's January 30, 2007 speech in
             East Peoria, Illinois, as posted at this White House site:
             http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/01/20070130- ....
- - -

     Cows are ruminants, they are meant to eat grass....

     Feeding corn and soy to cows results in a host of problems resulting in
the need to add daily doses of antibiotics to the feed to treat some of the
illnesses that occur. Things like liver abscesses are a common occurrence
among feedlot cattle....

     Aside from inappropriate grain and soy, feedlot cows are also fed any
or all of the following (all allowed by the FDA) feather meal, pig and fish
protein, chicken manure and pesticide-laden citrus peels. To protect against
the spread of mad cow disease, since 1997 the Animal Feed Rule prohibits
adding most mammalian materials to ruminant feed. However, chicken litter
and restaurant scraps (which both can contain bovine proteins) are still
allowed and many calves are still fed bovine blood meal.

     While they are being fed this concoction, designed to get them as heavy
as possible as quickly as possible, they are standing thigh deep in their
own waste creating an even bigger health problem  After slaughter, these
cows are then hosed off using high pressure sprays, which, rather than clean
the manure off the meat, imbeds it deeper into the muscle.

     And that is just cows.  Pigs and chickens are treated even worse....

          -- From "You are what you eat, eats," by Tanya Carwyn, at this
              Jan. 18, 2007 site of The Cherry Creek News and Central Denver
              Dispatch, Denver, Colorado:
              http://www.thecherrycreeknews.com/content/view/970/2/...
- - -

     Broiler litter contains bedding material, manure, wasted feed and
     feathers....

     Adding broiler litter to beef cattle rations at a level of 20% or
     higher ... generally meets the animal's needs for crude protein,
     calcium, and phosphorus....

     Cows may be wintered on a mixture of 89% litter.... Litter alone would
     meet the protein and energy needs of wintering cows if they ate enough
     of it....

     If cows are to be fed litter during lactation, start cows on litter
     rations before calving to ensure that intake is sufficient to meet
     nutritional requirements. Some animals may refuse to eat an adequate
     amount of broiler litter rations....

          -- From "Guidelines for Feeding Broiler Litter to Beef Cattle" at
              this North Carolina Cooperative Extension Service site:
http://www.bae.ncsu.edu/programs/extension/publicat/wqwm/ ....

- - -

     The Delmarva Peninsula, comprising Maryland, Delaware, and Virginia on
the Chesapeake Bay, an area also known as the Eastern Shore, produces a
million tons of poultry manure a year, according to The Washington Post,
Oct. 3, 1997. This manure is called "litter" because it is the main thing
the birds bed in from the time they are born-a mixture of fecal droppings,
antibiotic residues, heavy metals, cysts, larvae, decaying carcasses,
sawdust, ground up chicken heads, USDA condemned slaughter products, and the
mammalian nervous system tissue responsible for Mad Cow Disease. Poultry
litter is used as crop fertilizer and is fed to cattle....

          -- From "Md Gov. Glendening Goes Almost Vegetarian" at this summer
              2001 site of United Poultry Concerns:
              http://www.upc-online.org/summer2001/glendening_semi_veg. ....
- - -

     "The litter feeding issue has been in the hands of the FDA since 2002,
       but as of yet, they haven't called a halt to its use as cattle feed.
       It's currently legal to feed litter to beef cattle...."

          -- Robert Seay, Benton County staff chair for the University of
              Arkansas Cooperative Extension Service, as quoted at "In the
              News - August 2006: Arkansas cattle producers looking at
              emergency feed options," at this Aug. 25, 2006 site of the
              University of Arkansas, Division of Agriculture, Cooperative
              Extension Service:
              http://www.uaex.edu/news/august2006/0825litr.htm

- - -
With many thanks to December McSherry, cattle rancher, farmer, Florida
Sierra Club Agriculture Committee chair, and National Sierra Club
Agriculture Committee member.

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2007/2/1/8320/72156/#7

The researcher expressed her opinion that corn ethanol is a stepping stone to cellulosic. That was just her opinion. The news grabbed onto her comment as if it were a conclusion drawn from her research. It wasn't. It was just an off the cuff comment. But that is good because it shows that she has no hidden bias against corn ethanol.

But here are some results of her study:

"It is not clear, nor has it been demonstrated, that co-products produced from ethanol production are a replacement product"

"Based on her "most likely" outcomes, she concluded that traveling a kilometer using ethanol does indeed consume more energy than traveling the same distance using gasoline"

http://lfee.mit.edu/public/Groode_Current%20Corn%20Ethano ...

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/ethanol.html

In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world

Her positive comments about corn ethanol suggest a lack of bias against it (maybe a bias for it). Although one must always take funding into account.

In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world

The ongoing debate about ethanol's energy balance will soon take an interesting turn. Innovations such as fractionation and polymeric membrane technology will vastly improve the energy balance of corn-to-ethanol plants while also improving and diversifying the co-products. Unfortunately, the gold rush mentality that pervaded the ethanol industry these past few years caused many innovative technologies to be shelved in lieu of just getting the plant up and running. Now it's about building smart - before it was about building fast.

Dry mill fractionation separates each corn kernel into bran, germ and starch before the starch component is fermented. This process optimizes the value of each corn kernel. The Buhler Group(http://www.buhlergroup.com) is one company that offers fractionation technology to the ethanol industry. Fractionation increases the efficiency of ethanol production and energy use by 20%. The front-end fractionation process can be integrated with a biomass boiler, which allows the ethanol plant to produce over 90% of the energy the ethanol plant requires using the less valuable (carbon neutral) corn kernel fractions as fuel.

Ethanol plants using front-end fractionation will not produce the medium-protein, high-fat distillers grains produced in most ethanol plants today. Instead, the fractionation process will allow ethanol plants to produce a low-fat, low-fiber, high-protein animal feed, with a similar nutritive value as soy meal. Additionally, the separated germ can be further processed into substantial quantities of food-grade corn oil.  

If fractionation is coupled with polymeric membrane technology the increased efficiencies are compounded. Vaperma (http://www.vaperma.com) has developed membrane technology that replaces the rectifier and molecular sieve used in conventional ethanol plants. This translates into additional energy savings, as high as 40%.

Both Buhler's fractionation technology and Vaperma's membrane technology have been demonstrated industrially and will be available soon on a commercial basis.

It goes without saying that the profit motive will find more efficient ways to ferment corn into ethanol, within limits. Because you can only use the corn kernel for this process and the fact that corn must be grown on land and land is constrained, you quickly hit a limit on how efficiently and cheaply you can extract ethanol from a kernel using microbes to digest the sugars in it.

That is why most are pinning their hopes on cellulosic. Nobody, sees corn ethanol as a long term solution. Legislation to limit its production is inevitable. When our tariffs against cane ethanol drop, corn ethanol will become history, along with the Cerrado and the Amazon.

http://home.comcast.net/~russ676/Graphics/ethanolenergy.jpg

Pointing to articles that highlight ideas to make a dead end fuel more cost effective for its producers does not fix the fatal flaws associated with this fuel stock. Primarily leakage:

http://home.comcast.net/~russ676/photo/crayon2.JPG

In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world

Nifty chart, I've been trying to find something similar which I think Wang made, which compares switchgrass, sugarcane, eucalyptus, etc etc.

And yes, that Switchgrass is about half as good as Sugarcane.  (Incidentally, Temperate climates get about half as much sunlight as Tropical climates)

However one thing about the heading.

It says "Net energy
What the graph is really showing is EROEI.

It's not really "Net" unless you subtract the 1 unit of energy investment.

_

Another nifty chart to consider:
The system efficiency of various approaches
http://greyfalcon.net/cellulosics.png

What is it trying to say (too lazy to dig up PDF)?

In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world

and files for bankruptcy.

E3 Biofuels-Mead LLC, a startup that used cow manure to power its ethanol plant in Nebraska, filed for bankruptcy in Kansas after a boiler explosion.

The company's plant in Mead, Nebraska suffered an explosion in a boiler earlier in the year.

E3  made ethanol from corn and fed the crop "waste" to 28,000 cows on site. Then it made a biogas from the manure, of which it had large supply.

E3 Plant Craps Out
http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/e3-plant-craps-out ...

The Motley Fools say "Ethanol is Running Out of Gas."  Read the business article here:
http://www.fool.com/investing/dividends-income/2007/12/05 ...

What we feed to farm animals is pretty horrific. I learned a few months ago about the practice of putting in arsenic in chicken feed. Yes, ARSENSIC!

http://www.organicconsumers.org/foodsafety/arsenic060405. ...

The bottom line is we all need to eat less animal products, or better yet go veggie, and the animals we do raise for food must be fed diets that are the most natural to them.  Which is grass in the case of cows.

Last I checked we were omnivores not herbivores.  Eating meat is natural and people who eat meat are statistically healthier than people who don't this is because of the difficulty in getting the protein provided in meat from vegetables alone.  I bet you will die before I do have fun starving yourself by keeping your body from getting what it needs.

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