Draught Raises Corn Price, Milk Profits fall, Cows get Slaughtered

Regardless whether global climate change is man-made, or cyclical… it’s going to affect us all, and we would be wise to DO SOMETHING to PRESERVE, PROTECT and DEFEND ourselves NOW!

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Milk-Cow Drought Culling Accelerates as Prices Jump: Commodities

U.S. milk production is headed for the biggest contraction in 12 years as a drought-fueled surge in feed costs drives more cows to slaughter.

Output will drop 0.5 percent to 198.9 billion pounds (90.2 million metric tons) in 2013 as the herd shrinks to an eight- year low, the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates. Milk futures rose 45 percent since mid-April and may advance at least another 19 percent to a record $25 per 100 pounds by June, said Shawn Hackett. The president of Boynton Beach, Florida-based Hackett Financial Advisers Inc. correctly predicted the rally in March.

Dairies in California, the top milk-producing state, are filing for bankruptcy, and U.S. cows are being slaughtered at the fastest rate in more than a quarter century. Corn surged to a record in August as the USDA forecast the smallest crop in six years because of drought across the U.S. Global dairy prices tracked by the United Nations rose 6.9 percent last month, the most among the five food groups monitored, and that will probably mean record costs next year, Rabobank estimates.

“Farmers can’t afford to buy as much grain and protein, and that affects milk production,” said Bob Cropp, an economist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison who has been following the industry since 1966. “In California, there’ve been some foreclosures and some sell-off of cows quite heavily. You’re going to see that in other parts of the country.”

Mercantile Exchange

Class III milk, used to make cheese, jumped 22 percent to $21.05 on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange this year. That’s more than 21 of the 24 commodities in the Standard & Poor’s GSCI Spot Index, which rose 1.8 percent. The MSCI All-Country World Index (MXWD) of equities climbed 12 percent, and Treasuries

What will America use to fuel her vehicles when gas is $8/gallon? Natural gas – and we may do it much sooner!

Natural gas.

In fact, it’s being done now.

It way, way, way, way, way, way cheaper than petroleum, and burns clean too!

If you want to see the future, look at Interstate Commerce.

And, here’s another good side to natural gas as a fuel – because it burns cleaner, the engines last exceedingly longer! So now, your 100,000+ mile vehicle becomes a 200,000+ mile vehicle!

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Shale Gas Set to Reshape Trucking

By REBECCA SMITH

Updated May 23, 2012, 4:23 p.m. ET

Rising diesel costs, last year, forced Waste Management Inc. WM +0.91% to charge customers an extra $169 million, just to keep its garbage trucks fueled. This year, the nation’s biggest trash hauler has a new defensive strategy: it is buying trucks that will run on cheaper natural gas.

In fact, the company says 80% of the trucks it purchases during the next five years will be fueled by natural gas. Though the vehicles cost about $30,000 more than conventional diesel models, each will save $27,000-a-year or more in fuel, says Eric Woods, head of fleet logistics for Waste Management. By 2017, the company expects to burn more natural gas than diesel.

Darrold Withrow, 41, is a certified fueler and mechanic at Waste Management, and he fills up a truck with liquefied natural gas in Oakland, California. / Photograph by Alison Yin for The Wall Street Journal

“The economics favoring natural gas are overwhelming,” says Scott Perry, vice president of procurement at Ryder Systems Inc., R +2.31% one of the nation’s largest truck-leasing companies and a transporter of goods for the grocery, automotive, electronics and retail industries.

The shale gas revolution, which cut the price of natural gas to about $2.70 a million British Thermal Units in the past year, already has shaken up the utility industry, which is switching to natural gas from coal in a big way. Vast Amounts of natural gas in shale rock formations have been unlocked by improved drilling techniques, making the fuel cheap and plentiful across the U.S.

Now the shale-gas boom is rippling through transportation. Never before has