I thought this was interesting & wanted to share because it covers two topics that are important to me: Alternative fuels & fighting animal cruelty.

Using corn to make ethanol is picking up some steam (no fuel pun intended there!) And it appears that it may help benefit the fight against animal cruelty and factory farming:
- Ethanol is being made out of feed corn
- This is driving up the price of feed corn
- Factory farms have to pay higher prices for the feed corn for their animals that get slaughtered to put a slab of some type of meat on your table.
- Rising meat prices will cause less consumers to buy meat, ultimately resulting in less slaughtered animals

Tyson Foods has already been impacted & they expect it to result in higher food prices in 2007.

Here Erik Marcus from Vegan.com speak about this on his podcast (click here):

The original Nov 14 article from the Chicago Tribune (click here):

A short excerpt:
A 77 percent jump in the past year has made corn the most expensive since 1996, squeezing profit at companies such as Tyson Foods Inc.

The world's largest meat processor warned Monday that rising corn prices could mean consumers will have to pay more for chicken, beef and pork next year, as it ended its fiscal year with a third-straight quarterly loss.

"I believe the American consumer is going to have to pay more for protein. We are at new levels on corn that are not likely going to be retrenching back to '06 levels," said Chief Executive Richard Bond.

Bond said the price of corn, which is used to feed chicken and livestock, is going up because of demand from ethanol plants springing up to provide alternative fuel sources to oil.