Saving the Earth one Pork Chop at a Time

Lauren Etter, writing in today's Wall Street Journal, tells us that the use of corn for ethanol production has led farmers to some interesting substitutes for feed.

Growing demand for corn-based ethanol, a biofuel that has surged in popularity over the past year, has pushed up the price of corn, Mr. Smith's main feed, to near-record levels. Because feed represents farms' biggest single cost in raising animals, farmers are serving them a lot of people food, since it can be cheaper...(One farmer) says he's paying about $63 to feed a single pig for five or six months before it goes to market -- up 13% from last year. His costs would be even higher if he didn't augment his feed with trail mix, which he says helps him save on average about $8 a ton on feed. This year, Mr. Smith has bought enough trail mix to feed about 5,000 hogs, and that will save him about $40,000.

All of this so we can gum up our fuel injectors with ethanol.

Some of the farmers are using scraps from candy manufacturers. I wonder if it will make the pork taste like chocolate.