Bushel Of Corn Research Articles

Companies as Commodities

Like copper, corn, or crude oil, companies increasingly trade like commodities. Some investors — certain holders of debt, activist shareholders, and controlling shareholders, especially private equity funds — are focused solely on returns. In practice, this means that they care about the fate of the companies in which they invest no more than they care about the fate of any tonne of copper, bushel of corn, or oil barrel they happen to trade. These investors are so immune to reputational concerns that they will even prefer that the companies in which they invest fail if failure maximizes their return on investment. This Article identifies and labels these “going-concern-neutral” (GCN) investors. By virtue of their singular focus on return on investment, GCN investors are not bound by the same norms and relationships as other stake-holders in a company. This disconnect allows GCN investors to transfer an out sized share of company value to themselves. As a result, GCN investing typically increases the costs and risk faced by other stakeholders. This Article then uses property theory to understand GCN investing and the conflicts in the use of company value that it creates. Although it is contested whether GCN investors are properly understood as true owners of firms and their assets, accepting that premise to leverage the tools of property theory leads to significant insights. Analyzing these investors’ ownership claims through an exclusion framework reveals unseen nuances in the relationships between GCN investors and other stakeholders. Next, four property-law concepts — the right to destroy, waste, nuisance, and the tragedy of the commons — provide a rich source of analogies. These analogies reveal that the law has long used a number of so-called governance rules to manage property where there are several competing users. These rules restrict the rights of owners in order to address externalities and to promote welfare maximization. Although companies have been commoditized into mere property, the governance rules that restrict property ownership in other contexts do not yet apply to ownership of companies. It is time to consider interventions that would align the benefits and burdens of ownership of commoditized companies with ownership of other as-sets.

Techno-economic Analysis (TEA) and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of a Low Temperature Closed-Cycle Grain Drying System

The aim of this study was to understand the environmental and economic impact of the low temperature closed-cycle grain drying system by using techno-economic analysis (TEA) and life cycle assessment (LCA). For TEA, three scales including small (60 bu/batch), medium (600 bu/batch) and large (6000 bu/batch) were chosen for analysis the total annual drying cost and unit drying cost. For LCA, the greenhouse gasses (GHG) emission was the only environmental impact that considered in this study, since the electricity was the only energy source for this drying system. The TEA result shows that the drying costs for one bushel of corn were $0.62, $0.49, $0.46 for the small, medium and large scales of this drying system, respectively, and the drying cost could potentially be lower than grain elevators. The LCA results indicate that greenhouse gas emissions will increase along with the expansion of the drying system since the electricity comes from a local coal-based electricity plant, which potentially makes this drying system’s greenhouse gas emissions higher than other types of drying systems. Farmers can use this method to make decisions when handling their grain.

Investment Case for Commodities? Myths and Reality

Commodities are one of the least understood asset classes. Some investors wonder how owning a chunk of steel or a bushel of corn could provide them with any real return, particularly in times of deflation. Still others contend that the high historical returns for commodities are primarily the result of two commodity bubbles, and that, excluding those abnormal periods, commodities have had only poor results. Then, too, some see commodities as highly volatile and as too risky for most investors. This paper describes the fundamental properties of commodities to help institutional investors evaluate the case for investing in them.

Enzyme Production by Wood-Rot and Soft-Rot Fungi Cultivated on Corn Fiber Followed by Simultaneous Saccharification and Fermentation

This research aims at developing a biorefinery platform to convert lignocellulosic corn fiber into fermentable sugars at a moderate temperature (37 °C) with minimal use of chemicals. White-rot (Phanerochaete chrysosporium), brown-rot (Gloeophyllum trabeum), and soft-rot (Trichoderma reesei) fungi were used for in situ enzyme production to hydrolyze cellulosic and hemicellulosic components of corn fiber into fermentable sugars. Solid-substrate fermentation of corn fiber by either white- or brown-rot fungi followed by simultaneous saccharification and fermentation (SSF) with coculture of Saccharomyces cerevisiae has shown a possibility of enhancing wood rot saccharification of corn fiber for ethanol fermentation. The laboratory-scale fungal saccharification and fermentation process incorporated in situ cellulolytic enzyme induction, which enhanced overall enzymatic hydrolysis of hemi/cellulose components of corn fiber into simple sugars (mono-, di-, and trisaccharides). The yeast fermentation of the hydrolyzate yielded 7.8, 8.6, and 4.9 g ethanol per 100 g corn fiber when saccharified with the white-, brown-, and soft-rot fungi, respectively. The highest ethanol yield (8.6 g ethanol per 100 g initial corn fiber) is equivalent to 35% of the theoretical ethanol yield from starch and cellulose in corn fiber. This research has significant commercial potential to increase net ethanol production per bushel of corn through the utilization of corn fiber. There is also a great research opportunity to evaluate the remaining biomass residue (enriched with fungal protein) as animal feed.

Biotechnological processes for conversion of corn into ethanol

Ethanol has been utilized as a fuel source in the United States since the turn of the century. However, it has repeatedly faced significant commercial viability obstacles relative to petroleum. Renewed interest exists in ethanol as a fuel source today owing to its positive impact on rural America, the environment and United States energy security. Today, most fuel ethanol is produced by either the dry grind or the wet mill process. Current technologies allow for 2.5 gallons (wet mill process) to 2.8 gallons (dry grind process) of ethanol (1 gallon = 3.785 l) per bushel of corn. Valuable co-products, distillers dried grains with solubles (dry grind) and corn gluten meal and feed (wet mill), are also generated in the production of ethanol. While current supplies are generated from both processes, the majority of the growth in the industry is from dry grind plant construction in rural communities across the corn belt. While fuel ethanol production is an energy-efficient process today, additional research is occurring to improve its long-term economic viability. Three of the most significant areas of research are in the production of hybrids with a higher starch content or a higher extractable starch content, in the conversion of the corn kernel fiber fraction to ethanol, and in the identification and development of new and higher-value co-products.

The South's Thirsty Muse

Long before William Faulkner declared that civilization began with distillation, southerners knew it had achieved a genial and ruddy perfection in the South with the creation of that velvety smooth distillate of sour mash and sparkling limestone water known as bourbon. I refer not to the rot-gut, wildcat corn that every child of calamity ever raised to his lips in countless southwestern tales, nor to the white mule, or baldface John Barleycorn, or even the smooth-sippin' Tennessee Black Jack that Faulkner kept within reach while he wrote, but to good old bourbon, the Kentucky thoroughbred, the crown prince of whiskeys, and the eponymous spirit of Old Bourbon County, Kentucky. The distinction is not a matter of mere connoisseurship, but of tradition. It is by now a cliche that any writer who may be regarded as being connected in any way with the South--by birth or by temperament or by earnest affectation--that is, any writer whom we may without hesitation call southern, must have, at the very least, a general acquaintance with, if not a genuine affection for, the peculiar charms of John Barleycorn's genteel cousin. That is, if he have not the said spirits pocketed away--presumably in Grandfather's antique hinge-topped hip flask--some-where on his very person right now. So goes the myth, but what of the literature? What have southern writers themselves had to say about bourbon--its history, its merits, and its restorative and aesthetic influence on the writer and his work? And whence its enduring reputation as the South's thirsty muse? Between the bear hunters and bootleggers, the Johnny Rebs and dissipated gentlemen, there is whiskey enough to be found in the pages of southern fiction. But of proper, one finds mostly isolated anecdotes. Walker Percy's preference for Early Times. Twain's recollection of sharing his grandfather's whiskey toddy (at the age of six weeks, no less), his delight at being presented six cases of during his stay at London's Savage Club, and his dismay at having to leave the last two cases behind when called back home on business. These anecdotes aside, however, there are few revelations beyond what one might himself discover at the bottom of a shot glass, julep cup, or snub-nosed bottle. Bourbon, after all, if we are to cite again the common myth, is what the southern writer turns to when the book is finished or the words no longer come. We do find a few exceptions, however, like Irvin Cobb, the Kentucky humorist, whose novel Red Likker stands to this day as the only American novel to chronicle the rise and fall of Kentucky's bourbon aristocracy, and William Alexander Percy, whose Mississippi memoir, Lanterns on the Levee, includes a recipe for mint juleps guaranteed, he says, to bring about half an hour of sedate cumulative bliss. They, like Will's nephew Walker Percy, who conducted his own personal survey on the aesthetics of drinking in the South, are among those rare southern writers who managed to set habit aside long enough to decipher the message in the bottle.(1) In 1929, a year before the Nashville Agrarians published their manifesto, Irvin Cobb took his own stand against the New South by writing an agrarian novel that found in bourbon's rich history the spiritual sustenance lacking in an age of doubt. Written during the era of bath-tub gin and bootleg liquor, Cobb's novel is both a celebration of good honest and an elegy for the culture that produced it. Red Likker traces the fortunes of Colonel Attila Bird, a fictional patriarch of the belt and descendant, says Cobb, of that big-boned, fair-skinned, contentious, individualistic who first sprang from the cradle of civilization deep in the heart of Ken-rocky. The first settlers, we are told, were the first distillers, that hardy breed of early American argonauts who first discovered that a bushel of corn could make three gallons of whiskey and that those three gallons were worth more than a man could ever expect to make from corn alone. …

Testing Asset Fixity for Agriculture: Reply

The observations made by Lee and Baumel (LB) on our previous effort appear to cast some doubt on the methodology employed to test the asset fixity hypothesis for U.S. agriculture. As their criticism is of a fundamental nature, we welcome the opportunity to address the points they raise. To do so, it is only proper at the outset to sort out the major charges leveled against the Chambers and Vasavada (CV) asset fixity study and analyze them in sequence. The LB critique hinges on two types of objections. These are (a) that the asset fixity hypothesis cannot be tested under constant returns to scale, and (b) that the terms asset fixity and putty-clay are not freely interchangeable as CV suppose. The arguments advanced to justify these positions roughly adopt the following lines of reasoning. Under the cost minimization hypothesis, constancy of inputoutput ratios under constant returns to scale is consistent with variation in both inputs and output. Hence, rejection of the putty-clay hypothesis does not necessarily imply rejection of asset fixity since putty-clay merely requires constancy of inputoutput ratios while asset fixity requires no change in input quantities. For example, say labor-output ratios are somehow optimally determined to be ten hours per bushel of corn. Then ex post price variation may keep this ratio unchanged while the actual labor and output quantities demonstrate some variation. The second objection appears to take a broader view, while not necessarily abandoning the constant returns-to-scale criticism, that the asset fixity and putty-clay hypotheses are not one and the same thing. A graphical illustration of the behavior of a representative profit-maximizing firm, not a fixed output cost-minimizing firm, is provided to supplement this position. Of course, since profits are unbounded under constant returns to scale, LB point out that their illustration of the comparative-static behavior does not adopt this assumption. It would appear, therefore, from their arguments that not only is asset fixity untestable under constant returns to scale (both under cost minimization and profit maximization), but that any acceptable test procedure must invoke a distinction between the putty-clay and asset fixity hypotheses. Our efforts to address these criticisms proceed in two stages. First, it is shown that the asset fixity hypothesis can be tested under the constant returns-to-scale assumption. This LB contention is without theoretical or empirical content. Second, the broader objection relating to distinguishing between characteristics of technology (putty-clay) and economic responses (asset fixity) is discussed. This discussion reveals no major inconsistency between the position taken by LB and CV. Their concept of asset fixity corresponds to the weaker form of asset fixity, individual factor fixity, tested in the original CV formulation. Our conclusions are noted in the final section, and they justly reflect significantly greater optimism regarding the original CV study in comparison with those shared by LB.

Corn Distillers’ By-Products in Poultry Rations : II. Laying and Breeding Rations

BY-PRODUCT feeds recovered from the manufacture of alcohol from grains are materially adding to the supply of high-protein feeds and are resulting in a substantial reduction in the cost of producing alcohol for wartime uses. According to Jacobs and McBride (1943), for each gallon of alcohol produced, 0.4 bushel of corn is required and 3.8 pounds of corn distillers’ dried grains, containing 28 to 30 percent protein, are recoverable. As additional complete recovery equipment is installed, there should be a substantial increase in the supply of the dried by-products for use in both present-day and post-war feed mixtures. The Association of American Feed Control Officials (1944) recognizes three dried distillers’ by-products from corn: corn distillers’ dried grains, referred to hereafter as “screenings”; corn distillers’ dried grains with solubles, hereafter referred to as “grains”; and corn distillers’ dried solubles, hereafter referred to as “solubles.”Shea, Fellers, and Parkhurst (1941) and Nelson, .

A Bushel of Corn

THIS little book is full of originality and force. It appeals it is true to a class, but a large class. The title is happy and suggestive, and is a sufficient text for every paragraph between the covers. It is true the subject is not exhausted, for much more might doubtless be said concerning “a bushel of corn.” A Bushel of Corn. By A. Stephen Wilson. (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1883.)