Guest Piece: Out of Eggs
How Misguided Energy Policy is Fueling America's Food Crisis
Out of Eggs
How Misguided Energy Policy is Fueling America’s Food Crisis
By: Nathan Kaspar
The Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) originated in US Federal law in 2005, and over the past 18 years has caused dramatic ripple effects in both the energy and food production sectors. Prior to this federal legislation, food and fuel was largely decoupled. Of course, farmers used diesel in their tractors, and oil and gas workers enjoyed a good steak. The commodity prices of each of their end products were not directly blended, unlike today’s gasoline.
The RFS mandated that petroleum companies blend increasing levels of “renewable” bio-fuel into their products. This mandate didn’t come without funding, and hundnreds of billions of US Tax Dollars have been allocated to establish the ethanol industry in the United States. These payments have come in the form of direct subsidies (cash payments), deferred taxes, manufacturer’s subsidies, and more complicated methods.
The most lucrative of these complicated methods of compensation involve RINs (Renewable Identification Numbers). If you need a nap, you can begin a deep dive on RINs on the EPA’s website.
https://www.epa.gov/renewable-fuel-standard-program/renewable-identification-numbers-rins-under-renewable-fuel-standard
In short, a RIN is a credit that is created along with a gallon of ethanol which accompanies that fuel when it is sold to a refiner or blender. In order to maintain compliance with the RFS, the blender must purchase a certain number of RINs and gallons of ethanol or they will face steep fines. The economic issue for the blending company is that really don’t want to have to buy the ethanol at all. Ethanol dilutes the energy available in a gallon of gasoline, and makes the product more difficult and expensive to transport. If there was a way for blenders to buy less Ethanol but more RINs, they would.. And they have.
Most US Ethanol is made in a manner that isn’t terribly dissimilar than our favorite Tennessee and Kentucky distilleries. In fact, many ethanol producers that sell to Texaco and Shell also maintain spirits licenses. American consumers would likely be surprised that most of their vodka doesn’t come from Texas or Russia, it comes from a mid-west Ethanol producer who was also making a gasoline substitute.
The volume of corn that has to be converted into biofuel to meet RFS goals has gradually increased and strained the food commodity markets. You can imagine that if people were able to drink Gasoline and use it as an energy supplement for food, this would cause a demand spike for gasoline and price increase.
This is exactly what has happened to Food Commodity Prices as a result of mandated ethanol production. An artificial corn market has caused increased corn prices, inflated demand and cost for of corn, and other crops have been displaced causing the corresponding shortage and price increase.
The cost of converting these crops to fuel doesn’t just come out of American’s pocketbooks. The process of creating ethanol and bio-diesel has evolved to chase the ever-evolving RIN$, and there are nutrition trade offs for every type of “bio-fuel” that is created.
What does this have to do with egg production?
The January 30th edition of Tucker Carlson discussed the egg shortage in detail, with several farmers speculating that there was something wrong with their Purina produced chicken feed.
These farmers are correct.
https://www.foxnews.com/video/6319517278112
You would not think that your eggs and your gasoline come from the same place, but thanks to the RFS, they do. When the RFS began, standard ethanol was made from converting the starch from corn into ethanol. What was left over was called “Distiller’s Grains” and was sold on the US Commodities Markets as a feed product. Millions of tons of wet distiller’s grains went to beef and pork feed lots, and even more millions were dried and sold as a key ingredient in animal feed for virtually all species. If you go to your local feed store and look at any bag of animal feed, the ingredient list will likely start with “Processed Grain By-Products”. This is waste from ethanol production.
Is this bad? It hasn’t been for years, so why are chickens now suddenly not laying eggs.
The answer is that the nutritional trade-offs have change, as evidenced in this EPA Chart.
https://www.epa.gov/renewable-fuel-standard-program/overview-renewable-fuel-standard
Remember what I said earlier about nutritional trade-offs? This EPA graph shows the schedule to which nutrition has been stripped from the animal to human market, and put in gas tanks. When I entered the ethanol/feed market in 2014, the discussion of Cellulosic Ethanol was just beginning among producers, and sold as “front/back end systems” by vendors at the national Fuel & Ethanol Workshop. Ethanol producers were going along making money selling standard ethanol and D-6 RINs, but there was more money to be made with bio-diesel and ultra-valuable D3 RINs that accompany Cellulosic Ethanol.
Standard Ethanol strips the starch out of corn.
Cellulosic Ethanol is made with an enzyme process that strips the remaining carbohydrate from corn.
Bio-Diesel is made from stripping the fat out of corn.
The resulting “Processed Grain By-Products” from these ethanol plants is very different than previous years. Their profits are up with more ethanol and RINs to sell, but the byproducts are lower in volume and the nutritional remnants available to livestock are drastically diminished.
In the cattle feed segment, salespersons for Distiller’s Grain based supplements have long posed the question to Nebraska and Texas ranchers “Can you grow an offensive lineman on salad? No. Well, you can’t grow quality beef on grass alone either.” In spite of what the skinny-jean wearing butcher at Whole Foods tells you, grass fed beef is inferior to grain fed beef in marbling and flavor.
Malnourished cattle aren’t delicious. Malnourished chicken don’t produce eggs.
Not coincidentally, the newer “High Protein” feed commodities (because all other nutrients are stripped out) that are being marketed by Billion Dollar Ethanol Corporations such as ICM, POET, The Andersons, Koch Industries and others were sold these nutrient depleting processes specifically to target the poultry industry (and higher value RINs).
So, where does Purina stand on this? Have they issued a statement standing by their long history of producing consistent, nutritious animal feed? Not even close. In fact, if you go to the Purina website for their specialty feed for laying hens, they refuse to publish an ingredient list.
https://www.purinamills.com/chicken-feed/products/detail/purina-layena-high-protein-layer-feed
The internet is undefeated however, and photos of the ingredients in question are available online.
The glaring nutritional deficiencies in this feed is crude fat. Dried Distiller’s grains from 3 years ago could be counted on to test at 30% protein and 10% fat. These newer “high protein” coproducts with the fat and cellulose stripped out of them, and potentially substituted with lower cost, lower quality ingredients are simply not getting the job done on the farm.
Once these valuable nutrients from our farms are converted (in a net energy negative process), they are lost forever. You cannot get bio-diesel back into the food chain. We can’t get eggs from ethanol. We can, however simply drill for more fuel. We can stop the madness of turning half of our nation’s corn crop into a negligible portion of our energy supply. Farmers and ranchers need to be free of market interference so they can produce the food that America and the world relies on.
If you are wondering where the eggs are, they haven’t all been lost in the mysterious fires and to bird flu. The eggs are in your gas tank, and it’s flawed government policy that put them there.
You should demand that the government stop interfering with our food supply. The cost is becoming much more than just financial, we are on the verge of a global food crisis. Continuing to destroy nutrition for liberal “green energy” pet projects isn’t worth starving the 3rd world.
It isn’t even worth my Monday morning omelet (which I didn’t have).
It is amazing how much the government screws up and most of the time it is intentional. Had to forward this one to my neighbor where I get my eggs from.