Where do you get this stuff 579?

Brewing ethanol is an industrial process, which requires complete control. You can't throw in a few grapes, & some apple peal, & get an end product, except at a home still level , & even they, you'll get back less than your inputs if you muck with it that way.

I can see it now, the hippies of Nimbin, waiting for their olive harvest to press out some oil, to power the old ute to town. It would improve the town, many less hippies around while they waited.

Our smart Qld government spent a fortune building a sugar cane residue power plant, at the Rocky Point sugar mill. Almost worked too, when the mill collected the combustible matter for free. But you can't run a power house 5 months of the year, those pesky public servants want to be paid all year.

Transporting fuel material cost more than the power produced by any other material. If only they'd had a rail line to a coal mine, they would not have had to sell the thing off at a loss of hundreds of millions.

You can't even carry something as energy dense as coal by truck economically. The power produced is too expensive, & you kill too many innocent car drivers.

Farming! Anyone noticed the cropping land going back to grazing. This of course means grazing land turning into useless scrub. It doesn't go back to forest, that the wallabies might be able to use, just useless black wattle scrub.

Farmers sons aren't as stupid as their fathers were, & won't cop all that labor for stuff all return.

My place was a crop farm, a dairy, a Vealer farm, a lucerne farm, & grew chop chop for a feed lot. As a last resort they tried turf, but even that was not worth the effort, & is now a horse paddock.

I made some money, growing advanced shrubs for the landscape industry, but it would be easier, & probably more profitable, holding a stop/go sign at a road works sight.

Yes yabby, how times have changed.

Even cattle farming is non profitable unless you are one who has inherited a large farm, as costs have put an end to small time farmers with less than 200 breeders or so.

The problems with farmimg today are costs. Wage costs, IR restrictions, compliance costs, consumables costs, they are all out of hand and, it is for this reason that I feel many farmers will turn away from the highly regulated food farming and move to the less demanding option of bio fuel farming.

As for enjoying farm life, I am now doing just that.

I have closed my shop, just to hard now. I now cut timber on my land, make more than I can in the shop, have no landlord, no IR laws to consider, living the dream.

The reason we are becoming a net importer of food is not because we don't have the land, rather,, it's become unaffordable to be a viable business.

One thing about bio fuel is that the demand will always be there, so farmers can plant knowing that the market will be there in the end.

It is a real worry in my opinion.

Hasbeen There will always be cartage involved, some industries pay to get rid of what could be fermentable material. You can mix grapes and corn trash, once it is pressed you would not know what it started out being. You need to think a bit deeper, You can't have a processing plant in the middle of a crop, you will always be looking for more.

579 you didn't answer the question.

Where do you get this rubbish, some some greenie propaganda mag, or a fertile imagination?

If the real world was as fertile as greenie imagination, we could scatter a few seeds, & live in milk & honey for ever.

Rectub - weren't you the same person who signed in a couple of weeks ago saying you had the drillers starting for CSG exploration on your property - weren't you saying help you did not know anything about it? Well your comment that the water CSG drillers were extracting was not the water the farmers were using is correct - instead by extracting this artesian water the drillers are creating a drawdown effect on the potable water aquifers - QLD figures talk of 80-90m drawdown, recharge may take up to 125 years but never mind the gas companies will make good if it can be proven they created the drawdown! So how about doing your research - because CSG will impact upon amount of arable land available for food or ethanol production.

Bio fuel: right thinking, wrong methodology. there are hundreds of production waste products to make BF other than what we eat. Victoria has dedicated rail to coal face & power plants. Right now 40,000 gas wells are being drilled and capped [ not fraking ]. Oz can [used to] produce 3 times the food OUR population can eat from 2% of the land resource. We have enough generating power to supply us and New Guinea, what we DON'T have is the transmisssion infrastructure. The coal we sell to china is NOT used for electricty because it's too high a grade - it's used in steel production, china burns it's own crap coal. It takes 2 years for water to travel from New Guinea to Oz aquifers. There is enough water under Oz to turn the desert into a tropical paradise [ eg: Israel ]Coal seam fraking will destroy this water. If we don't stop the Labor Gov insain solutions, we will become another Greece and people will have to do an Egypt demo on them. Oz ows twice the money / head of Population as the USA so technically were insolvent. We owe 189 billion which will take 42 years to pay off with a yearly surplus of 2.8 billion [ pigs fly ]
or 189 years to pay interest only at just 1%. Labor is borrowing since instalation 1.2 billion a week - look out, world government is coming to us by STEALTH! There ARE solutions but no one is listening.