A1A South

PORT WENTWORTH, Ga. (AP) — Imperial Sugar is moving to quickly rebuild the portion of its massive Georgia refinery destroyed by a dust explosion after its board of directors approved the decision this week.

The company’s chief executive, John Sheptor, said yesterday the Port Wentworth refinery, the second largest in the U.S., is on track to resume refining raw sugar before the end of year. He said a new sugar packaging plant and storage silos, replacing those destroyed or heavily damaged in the blast, should be completed by spring 2009.

Sheptor said the company has put 275 of the refinery’s 371 employees back to work, and that number will increase in the coming weeks as workers start cleaning hardened sugar from refining equipment that hasn’t been touched since the explosion.

Sheptor said, “There’s a lot of activity. People are happy to be back at work and looking forward to restarting this factory.”

The February 7th explosion erupted when combustible sugar dust inside the plant ignited like gunpowder. The blast killed 13 people and injured dozens more. Six workers remain hospitalized with severe burns, three of them in critical condition. About 12 percent of the plant, which produces Dixie Crystals brand sugar, was destroyed.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the U.S. Chemical Safety Board are still investigating at the refinery.

Source: First Coast News

This should be really good economic news for the Savannah area.

This is a PDF file from Texas AMU discussing the role of high corn prices on Texas food and feed (which is playing out across the US).

The synopsis is that corn prices are high. Farmers are taking advantage of higher prices by devoting more acreage to corn, which in turn leads to a less acreage in other grains leading to a lower supply, driving those prices higher.

Livestock growers have had their cost of inputs in the form of feed prices double in some cases while livestock prices are holding steady or falling and are unable to recoup their costs leading to more animals being placed on the market as herds and flocks are being culled and liquidated. (Yes, I know that you are puzzled by the high meat prices in your grocery store. The livestock grower isn’t seeing any of that unless he markets his own beef/lamb/goat/chickens/hogs.)

I don’t really have time to mess with individually marketing each lamb, so I’ll probably dump some at auction and save the rest for family freezers. If I’m going to lose money, I’d rather just give the meat to family. Besides, the lambs are mostly pastured; I’ve had to feed more grain than I like because of the multi-year drought, lack of grass, and lack of hay. That appears to be coming to an end (I hope).

I used to have pens for pasturing poultry but they were heavy and awkward to use; I might go ahead and butcher about 50 free-range chickens that I use for bug patrol to thin out the annoying crowing roosters, put together some pens to keep chicks (and ducks) confined but on pasture in pens that are moved daily with supplemental feed, and grow and butcher another 500 or so for family use. Those of you who live in a suitable place may be able to put together a low-cost portable pen and raise some fryers 25 at a time in your backyard without anybody catching on. The movable pens would keep a smelly manure problem from accumulating, and chicks can go from little fluffy down things to slaughter size in 6 to 8 weeks.

If you have the space this year, putting in a garden might not be a bad idea either. You can grow a surprising amount of food in a *very* small space by going vertical and/or following the guidelines by Mel Bartholomew for Square Foot Gardening. The row method of gardening using the rototiller that I used in the past was too much like work plus a poor use of space and when we get those tropical deluges, the garden drowned. I like the raised bed square foot gardening method much better, as long as I can keep the fire ants and snakes out.

My grandmother used a method in which she used a heavy mulch to keep the weeds down; she spread out a thick blanket of hay or straw in her garden location (on top of the decomposed hay or straw from the previous year), pulled it back to plant her seedlings that she had started in her greenhouse, and picked the veggies when they ripened. No weeding for her! Grandma, however, had a green thumb and feel for plants that I do not have. She always grew her own garden and when she died at the age of 92, her garden was still going.