He is energetic and brilliant in his field of herbal medicine, well respected by his colleagues and something of a legend among his peers in the natural products industry. Success is frequently reserved for the bold, and Dr. Leung is one of the boldest people I know.

If you’d like to see more of why I get inspired by Dr. Leung, here’s a second YouTube video, this time of him discussing his life (warning: this one’s a little longer!).
Please accept my apologies. The clip of Dr. Leung visiting about his history has been taken down for further editing. When it reappears, I will again link to it here.

This Inspires Me (Part Two) is a post from: shannonehlers.com

More on Corn/Ethanol- The Economist: The End Of Cheap Food is a post from: shannonehlers.com

With that in mind, take a look at the video below. By the way, stay tuned because I’ll tell you some little known facts about this in part two. Many of you already know my “little secret”, and even if you don’t it might seem obvious if you’ve been following along, so just play along and don’t spoil the surprise for others!

This Inspires Me (Part One) is a post from: shannonehlers.com

No, this time I just want to plug a long-time favorite band of mine, a group I grew up listening to. In the late 1970s I was about four feet tall and singing along with my cousin Tim a.k.a. Levi, on songs like “Clementine”, “The Old Double Diamond”, and “Buckskin Lady”. He performed with the cowboy group The Starlite Ramblers. The recordings were on 33 rpm records (I’m going to confuse the youngsters with this reference).

In the ’70s, Tim was a singer, songwriter, and guitarist. Thirty years later, he’s all of that still, and you can now get all the original music in digital versions, as well as some more up-to-date tunes as well.

At that time, they were providing the antidote to disco music. If you have an extra twelve bucks, and you’d like to hear legitimate western music, I cannot say it loudly enough – go to their web site, buy a CD and give it a listen. By the way, you can try before you buy – they have mp3 samples of most songs.

Lord I was born a ramblin’ man is a post from: shannonehlers.com

I worked for a while in the research center of a large agricultural genetics company where we used to estimate that 80% of corn seed is grown for inclusion into livestock rations. Considering this, can we assume that the price increase in the broad category of food is completely due to increases in just this one input, largely used for meat production? I don’t think so. I think a main contributing factor is the cost of fuel, both as a cost of transport and as other additional costs in food production and delivery.

Enter the renewable fuels industry, tasked with creating an American-style innovative revolution both here and around the world in how we turn raw materials into usable energy. Think about this and what that statement really means: we want to totally change the model for energy production. Why?

Currently our energy production is almost wholly unsustainable. We import a finite natural resource, crude oil from a politically unstable part of the world at a fairly high transportation cost and a potentially catastrophic political cost. Crude oil usually requires much processing in large refineries located mainly around the gulf of Mexico. This creates byproducts that are useful, as well as several byproducts which are poisonous, and of course the main product which then must be transported via pipeline, rail car, and truck to various points throughout the country. We extract coal from deposits deep within the earth leaving unsightly and poisonous landscapes in our wake. Coal is similarly destructive in its production and use.

We are moving towards using a diverse set of renewable resources, some based on biological inputs, some based on geophysical inputs. Frequently these can be turned into fuel more efficiently with much less processing, can be produced locally with much less pollution than oil import/refining, frequently producing companion industries based on other useful co-products, and can be made again and again while leaving the sources intact.

So what’s the catch? In the case of corn, critics point out that it is an inefficient substrate for alcohol production. Depending on whose scientist you talk to, you can find people who say that you only get 1.1x efficiency (it takes 1 unit to produce 1.1 units) up to 1.3x efficiency. When we think about building plants to make fuel at a 10% to 30% advantage, it almost seems pointless doesn’t it?

The typical ethanol plant currently consists of three main parts: a milling operation to separate the starchy part of the corn kernel from the germ, a mashing and fermentation operation to convert the starch first to sugars then turn this into an alcohol / water mixture known as “liquor”, and a distillation and purification operation to separate the bulk alcohol from the liquor, with purification to remove the last bit of water from the alcohol.

As Jeff Bruck, an associate in the ethanol industry, points out in his comment on Part 1 of 2: Squanto Would Be Proud (LINK),
“Biofuels use corn and other grains which right now are logistically and economically the best source. This won’t always be true. Cellulostic technology is improving every day and will someday be the standard.” Bruck also made good points about the need for greater support of flex fuel technology (both cars and distribution points).

The good news is that there is a much larger advantage in cellulosic ethanol production (utilizing fibrous plant biomass as a carbohydrate source). However, this leads to another criticism (LINK) of biofuels, which is that we are essentially mining the nutrients out of our land by growing intensive monoculture to support an almost endless appetite for more corn. Although somewhat dated, Bloomberg News published a piece that examined many of these issues in more detail.

I don’t argue with the idea that we are diminishing our soil tilth, but I do think that corn for ethanol is a strictly “now” situation. Today we use corn as a feedstock because of its abundance and the easy conversion of the energy portion of the grain. We have perfected the milling and mashing process already, so this involves little to no learning curve, allowing us to instead focus our innovation on the remainder of the energy conversion and fuel delivery process.

Is this the end of the story? No, certainly not if you compare an ethanol plant to an oil refinery. Unlike oil refineries, which are concentrated around importation points (especially the Gulf Coast area), we are building these modern and technologically superior plants in this country at a rapid pace, among geographically diverse locations. This is creating a source of economic diversification for thousands of small communities. This diversification will hopefully outlast the ethanol boom. They are far too numerous and geographically separated to become easy infrastructure targets for terrorists. They can be considered a local source of energy, requiring fewer transportation miles for either the feedstocks or the finished product.

Additionally, today’s ethanol plants are potentially useful beyond just fuel production, so that when and if we find the “next big thing”and move away from ethanol, there will be entrepreneurs lined up to occupy and use these very functional facilities. Combining fermentation, distillation and purification under one roof presents numerous value added manufacturing opportunities, both within and beyond the agricultural realm. No white elephants here. Possibilities exist from food and beverage production to pharmaceutical preparative processes, low tech to high tech, these facilities will serve well and should be easily expandable to accommodate a wide variety of uses and any needed growth.

Compare these features to those of an oil refinery, often old and decrepit and rarely found far from the Gulf of Mexico, offering very little alternate use and situated in a concentrated area of production, which concentrates the ill effects.

Finally, are we demanding too much of a single source of alternative fuel? We want diverse choices for our energy, so let’s use a diverse array of fuel sources. Why try to get it all in ethanol? People want ethanol to be a green fuel, a renewable fuel, a domestic fuel, a cheap fuel, a fuel whose manufacture doesn’t affect market prices for any of the inputs, and the list of wants goes on. No energy source can do all of this, no energy source is the be-all, end-all. But we’ve treated Middle Eastern Oil as the one source for all these years, basing whole industries, even entire economies, on its use.

Creating diverse and reliable energy sources should be our priority. This is like product development on a world scale. To change our entire model of energy production, we will have to progress through several stages. On that path, we may need to accept ethanol production from corn as one stage due to the rapid availability of corn, our mastery of its production, and its status as the current “low hanging fruit”. It is almost certain, though, that development of the next stage will be quicker than the corn ethanol stage. Additionally, we need to consider corn ethanol only one part of a large set of energy production tools to free us from dependence on one or two main energy sources (currently oil and coal). We need to look to the future and say “What next?”. I’d suggest continuing with ethanol and biodiesel, and beyond that, pursuing solar energy, nuclear power, cellulose based fuels, waste derived fuels, wind generated electricity, biomass replacement for coal, and hydroelectric generation just to start.

Thanks to the many people who have patiently given me input for this post, I appreciate and respect each of you, and I owe you all a favor. It is a big topic, so there may be more…

Part 2 of 2: Squanto would be proud… is a post from: shannonehlers.com

This leads us into the topic of our post, corn for ethanol. In a politically charged year, and in a state where this subject is also politically charged, I put myself into the path of the train by saying anything at all about the subject. But I can’t resist.

I try to listen to Bob Brinker’s Moneytalk program every chance I get, and not because I need to learn market timing strategies or because I have a big old jar of money I need to invest, but because I typically find his guests informative.

Today, Bob’s main guest was John Zogby, the pollster. Before letting us hear the polling guru, though, Bob tackled this issue of corn for ethanol, making the statement that has oft been made in the news lately that the ethanol industry is responsible for dramatic increases in food costs. His proposition was that instead of using corn for ethanol we ought to be pushing for more and better nuclear power.

Bob is using a technique that frequently is used by politicians, and creating a question around an issue that is hard to challenge or disagree with. Obviously, we can understand the basic economics of using a commodity that is chiefly a livestock ration as a source of fuel alcohol. For livestock feeders, supply goes down and price goes up. Fine, no disagreement. The issue of nuclear power is a bit more touchy, but again, it is hard to argue with the idea of using a clean source of power for which the production technology has largely been mastered by U.S. and international industry.

The ideas that I can challenge, though, are the premises for the argument. Bob Brinker’s statements about ethanol and nuclear power stem from two main points. The first is the notion that we need to keep the cost of food down, at least as low as it has been and maybe lower. The second is a direct challenge to biofuel production as a viable alternative to foreign petroleum, by painting the whole industry with a single “ethanol” brush. I want to examine the food production part today, and take the energy issue into consideration in a future post.

Do you agree with the idea that our food costs are already too high? I don’t. I know that many people have much too much ‘stuff’ already, so much so that “decluttering” has become an industry unto itself. This points to the idea that our disposable income is such that more food costs can be absorbed by the average family, while perhaps displacing spending on some of this unneeded “stuff”. It is really a matter of examining what we define as “needs” and how they differ from “wants”.

If we value a high-quality, low-risk food supply, then we must be willing to pay a fair price for it. Someone has to produce that food, and to my way of thinking, we get only what we pay for. We ought to have the very best food production system in the world. Hands down, the best. And we shouldn’t sacrifice quality for price in this area.

The people who produce, prepare, and deliver food should be able to live comfortably on the income from their operations. This is equally as vital as the service a doctor provides. Additionally, growing corn is capital intensive, it requires investment in land, machinery, and seed – all before any return is realized by the farmer. It is hard work in often harsh conditions. And it is a huge risk (many things can ruin a crop, and the farmer won’t know until harvest time if he has a harvest or what his yield will be).

Food production is something we ought not try to cheapen just because some people don’t want to spend more money for the pizza or steak that they eat. It is something we certainly shouldn’t outsource to other countries. I take this position partly due to the recent history of quality control we have seen from certain foreign nations, and partly due to what I consider another real cause of food cost increases: transportation cost, especially related to the increase in fuel cost.

Despite a growing awareness that we ought to eat more local foods, both for economical and ecological reasons, we don’t actually do it: look at your potatoes, I bet that unless you live in Idaho, they aren’t very local; look at your apples, and then look toward Washington state; take a look at your oranges, and send thanks to California and Florida. I could go on, but you get the idea.
Our food production cost requires attention, and although corn is a legitimate input cost in many consumer goods, until we attempt to deal with 300% to 500% increases in basic fuel costs, it will not really matter. We still will need to process the food, to store and often refrigerate the food, and to get the food to the consumer (including the cost of trucking the food to stores and the cost of shoppers driving to the stores).

This is where we will pick up next time: fuel cost, energy, and transportation and how they all relate.

Give your thoughts, I’m anxious to hear!

Part 1 of 2: Squanto would be proud… is a post from: shannonehlers.com

In my first post, I’m simply describing the weather here – it’s mighty cold and going to get colder!

If you’re listening to me on Utterz, don’t forget to dig a little deeper over at http://shannonehlers.com/ where you can find the rest of my content.
Mobile post sent by littletownblues using Utterz.  Replies.  mp3

Innaugural Post – I joined the Herd! is a post from: shannonehlers.com

One justification for this approval was that there appears to be no danger posed by food from cloned livestock. This is reckless approach to a complex issue, if you ask me. It is a little like saying that although an army tank might be dangerous if it is armed, you can drive one around town if you just leave the shells at home, because at that point it poses no apparent danger.

While I consider myself fairly progressive with regard to scientific innovation, I also consider myself a thoughtful food consumer. Having grown up in an agricultural area, and having family ties to the grocery business, and with a professional interest in food production, I have had lots of time and opportunity to think about what I eat.

One thought that I have is that some things work better in “low gear” and some should be pushed a little in order to get certain tasks done in a timely manner.

If you are planning to plant corn after the fourth of July parade, then you can bet you won’t face much success. Planting is something that happens in the spring, on a schedule. When it is time to go, you go. Feeding livestock is another task that must be done on time. Late just won’t cut it.

Planting your crops on time, however, doesn’t mean planting your field with the tractor in road gear. Likewise, farmers don’t expect the plants to grow at a quicker pace than nature will allow.

Genetic mutation is, I think, something that should happen at a slow and natural pace in the great outdoors, not rushed by nerdy guys in white coats at the lab bench (it is OK for me to stereotype them, because I am them).

A safety net that all of the species on earth enjoy is that of genetic diversity, or in other words, a broad pool of genes to select from as the generations proceed. Genetic diversity demands a slow and natural mutation process, not instantaneous, “on-demand” mutations initiated by man.

It is the wild types and “waste animals” that become the vehicles for genes which, while perhaps not studied by well-funded scientists, are likely the best insurance policies against creating a dominant class of animal that eventually becomes devoid of desirable traits like disease resistance, longevity, weather hardiness, and reproductive vigor. The truth is that we don’t know how our experimentation will affect generations of animals into the future, because we’ve not had the required time to observe these effects yet.

I don’t think that our genetic basis for life is anything less than miraculous and I don’t think that it is nearly so easy to understand as we sometimes like to assume. Relationships aren’t always only the ones we can observe, some causes have multiple and unknown effects. Clearly a newspaper article doesn’t qualify you to make these decisions, but I wonder how many of the bureaucrats at the FDA have studied this issue beyond the white papers provided by the lobbying groups for either side of the argument. While the food itself may be safe for human consumption, and I would still emphasize the word “may”, I find it difficult to believe that humans can exert proper control over something as complex as genetic cloning, especially in light of all the other things we have already gotten so wrong.

read more | digg story

Do it because you can? Cloning gets the go ahead. is a post from: shannonehlers.com

A POLISH schoolboy who turned a city’s tram network into a giant toy by maneuvering rolling stock using a TV-style remote control has been arrested after he caused chaos on the public transport system. It is probably good to arrest the kid and give him an appropriate punishment, but once that is finally done, it might not be a bad idea to figure out a better way to remote control the trains. If any schmuck with a TV remote can go derail the trams, do you really think this will be the last time?

I am always on the look-out for train related news and I also have a little blog about my developing model layout at http://bvcentral.blogspot.com. Check it out and let me know what you think!

read more | digg story

Boy Injures Dozens by Playing Trains w/City Trams is a post from: shannonehlers.com

I’m not a farmer, and I don’t own land or livestock, so I don’t really have any skin in the game, so to speak.  I do have fond memories of my grandfather’s farm, and I did spend a good portion of my early professional life with a large agricultural concern doing research on silage production and animal nutrition.

I guess what I really like about the local farm broadcast is that you get to observe the market in real time, as it reacts to weather, and to the news and events of the day.  The broadcasters, if they are good professionals, will help you to understand the ins and outs of this dynamic marketplace, and how the food you are eating for lunch fits into the entire matrix of local, regional, national and world events.

Like most everything, technology has vastly influenced farm broadcasting and in the case of my own local station, it has been positive.  We now have podcasters doing features, we have multiple ways to receive the live broadcast including streaming audio, digital radio and regular over the air signals.

If you’ve never tuned in a farm broadcast because you’re not involved in agriculture, why not give it a try?  You don’t need to live in ag-land, you can “surf” to many ag broadcasters, including our local station at http://whoradio.com where you can click the “Listen Live” link at the top of the page from 11:30 AM to 1:00 PM Central Time.  Alternately, you can also visit the site’s own dedicated farm show page, http://www.whofarm.com/, where you can read about the “Big Show”, as the daily farm broadcast is called.

If you are a regular ag listener, why not reply and let us all know which station and show are your favorite?

What Can I Learn From Farm Broadcasters? is a post from: shannonehlers.com