10% Less Corn

There's a fair bit of noise in the news about how many of USA's grain crops are getting a really bad start due to too much rain, ain't that fabulous news.
It came out not too long ago that the current USA grain reserves is at it's lowest level in a long time. One of the headlines I seen today was along the lines of only 1 out of 10 corn seeds sprouted.
Apparently the USDA's numbers predict 10% less than last year for corn.
11.735 billion bushels versus last year's 13.074 billion bushels, a billion bushels here, a billion there, pretty soon you're talking about a substantial amount of grain.
So lets see now, thats 1.339 Billion bushels less or 1,666,326,584 cubic feet or 12,464,988,003 liquid gallons and weighs 74,984,000,000 lbs
What could this teensy bit of grain fill?
If you were going to stash it at your retreat you'd need 2,492,997,601 standard 5 gallon pails
or about
9,978,003 Chevy Suburbans
40.6 Houston Astrodomes
360 Titanics
45 Empire State Buildings

At 150 lbs per capita per year it could feed the country of Mexico (~109 million) their staple starch for a little over 4.5 years

I'm wondering if this is going to hit the evening news and the sheeple will be clearing all the Jiffy Pops and Old El'Paso taco shells off the shelves. OMFG I better get a move on my Doritos preps like yesterday

This is all back of the napkin calculations & quick googles for stats, if I missed a click and was entirely wrong on a calc please let me know, I will give you credit as a math whiz, then send you shiny Canadian nickel that has a melt value of over $0.10 . Providing of course you don't consider me a complete Reptilian Lizard from the Fourth Dimension Overlord believing lunatic that in no way shape or form would you ever give your home address to.

Light the tires and kick the fires - this basket is really starting to move.

OMFG choking at sight of flour price

We took a ride into town today to do a little of this and that, stopped at the local grocer, Lord Thunderin' Jesus help us all, $14.00 for a 10kg bag of the store brand white flour (just about 25lbs fer you 'mericans).
Probably only 1 week ago it was I believe $8 to $10 depending on brand, I thought the prices were going to climb bit by a little over the summer, but nope. We were warned it was coming, now it's here. Stocking up on tangibles doesn't seem like such a bad idea now does it?
A grain mill certainly just climbed way the heck up in my machinery to get list.

Not much new marked off of the projects list, other than a decent desktop computer. I picked up a 2ghz Athlon machine from the dump that was simply borked by viri and spyware, nothing a little linux injection won't fix. My goodness I wanted one of these machines when they first come out, they are still overkill for my day to day computing.
A few other dump finds, mower that worked first pull with fresh oil & gasoline, more bikes blah blah blah.

Got a load of peat for the garden, now I'm set to plant, and just in time from what the locals are telling me.
No work done on the greenhouse yet, still sniffing around for some free lumber, but I'll probably have to break down and buy it.

Almost forgot, for those that are stocking up on Calcium Hypochlorite pool shock for water disinfection but have yet to find info on how to use it check out the USA EPA directions http://www.epa.gov/ogwdw/faq/emerg.html

That's all for now.