Thursday Take-The-Time Takes Us To A Fully And Finely Functioning Friday,

Thank you all for visiting “Harry & Jack and the Breakfast Club” and if you haven’t yet please stop by and see if there are any Fruity Fishies left — probably not but it’s worth the sight.

Milo is on the rise. Uncle Joe is done with his milo harvest, but grain sorghum (the other name for milo) is on the rise and in the news. The Dallas Morning News reports that “Sorghum ethanol on way? – US on verge of approving it as a cleaner option than corn.” We all love corn, especially that volunteer mutation sweet corn, but it seems that too much of the world’s #1 grain crop corn is being diverted to make biofuel. So folks are looking for alternative feedstocks to make biofuels. In response, a plant in the state of Kansas is renovating to be the first to turn sorghum into advanced ethanol.

Milo grain sorghum has certain perceived advantages over corn in the production of biofuels from green or plant sources grown on the ground, compared to the refining of conventional fuels from black or crude oil sources extracted from under the ground. As you can imagine, there are a lot of political and regulatory maneuverings here, but there are also some interesting sorghum facts pushing toward its greater use in fuel production.

Milo or sorghum is not a main ingredient in people foods. So, diverting milo to fuel production may not affect food prices to the extent some critics say corn diversion is increasing your bill at the grocery store. In addition, sorghum is drought tolerant, which means it requires less water than corn, about one-third less. There is a recognized environmental advantage here in preserving our natural resource, water or H2O, for other uses and consumptions. And, from seed to gas in your tank over its lifetime, milo or soghum has been determined to produce fewer of those greenhouse gases which surround our Earth in a comforting blanket, which apparently is becoming too comfortable a covering and is thought by many to be causing our ice to melt and our temperatures to rise. All these factors have contributed to the US Environmental Protection Agency qualifying sorghum as an advanced biofuel, which I suspect allows sorghum/milo, if grown within the EPA’s proper specified green technology guidelines, to qualify for certain federal monetary incentives, which is probably why that biofuels plant in western Kansas is retooling to get on the sorghum bandwagon.

For Uncle Joe, all these machinations, regulations and revisionings may mean that he will grow some advanced milo to catch the rising sorghum rocket and hopefully the associated rise in market pricing. A better return for their milo and an improved environment would both be appreciated by our hard-working farmers. They spend a great deal of time in that environment, appreciate it very much and I believe want very much to help.

Enjoy what you are doing and look for ways to improve your environment,

Grandpa Jim