Demand likely will prompt farmers to plant more acres in corn, he said. Ethanol fuel, which is blended with gasoline, is consuming 20 percent of last year's corn crop and is expected to gobble up more than 25 percent of this year's crop. The price of corn, the main feed for livestock, has driven the cost of feeding chickens up 40 percent, according to the National Chicken Council. Meat and poultry production will fall as producers face higher feed costs, the department said in its monthly...

Not only will the Kool-Aid peddlers pass out the Dixie Cups again, they have added a new wrinkle to their solution: the elimination of the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) as a measure to increase corn acres to keep prices low in order to expand exports and thereby provide, once again, prosperity for all. Their solution to the farm crisis of the late 1970s was to lower prices paid to farmers in order to reclaim the export volume of 1973-74 and prosperity would follow. With the...

The USDA said because soybean and corn are quite often interchangeable in parts of the Midwest and South, farmers have dropped beans to go with corn because corn prices have all but doubled over the last year. But US analysts warn the surge in corn plantings brings to the fore the emerging debate about food-versus-fuel debate: is it right to push more and more arable land away from crop growing for food and into fuel production: it's a policy the Bush Administration is going to be focusing...

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WASHINGTON: US farmers will plant their highest levels of corn since 1944 amid surging demand for ethanol fuels to replace petroleum, a government report showed yesterday. The move to corn, a key crop for ethanol used for gasoline blends, comes amid a decline of 11pc in acreage devoted to soybeans and a 20pc drop in cotton plantings. The shift to ethanol has changed the landscape for both the energy sector and agriculture as increasing amounts of corn are diverted to fuel. Bill Nelson, an...