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A hectare (2.47 acres) of jatropha produces 1,892 liters (500 gallons) of fuel. 202 gallons per acre.

The US consumes about 400 million gallons of gas and 70 million gallons of diesel per day. At 200 gallons per acre per year, we'd need to plant 850 million acres of jatropha to replace petroleum. According to Google, that's about 1.3 million square miles, or about a third of the land area of the United States.

Since we currently only cultivate 440 million acres[pdf], that would be a significant challenge.

Agriculture.

WASHINGTON, Aug. 31, 2007 - Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns today announced a record $79 billion forecast in FY 2007 agricultural exports. For fiscal year 2008, USDA forecasts exports to reach $83.5 billion with growth and new sales across all major agricultural product groups. U.S. Agricultural Exports Expected To Reach Record Levels

I don't think it's fair to blame NASA, a single government agency, for a policy that was established by the White House and covers all federal government departments and agencies: Department of Agriculture, etc.

"Processed soybeans are the largest source of protein feed and vegetable oil in the world. The United States is the world's leading soybean producer and exporter." from http://www.ers.usda.gov/Briefing/SoybeansOilCrops/

Also

"China's annual grain production is expected to hit a new high of 520 million tons in five years but rising consumption will still leave a shortfall"
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2006-02/24/conte nt_4221719.htm

You can argue vegetables or meat, but the vast majority of the world gets almost all their calories from grains.

I believe the US exports at least a sizable portion of any grain it produces, but I could be wrong.

What about Wireless ISPs? I run one in Texas and give my customers ~40ms pings to nearly peering point in Dallas. The bandwidth may be slow and expensive compared to cable/dsl providers in large cities, but the only other alternatives are dial-up or satellite. My customers also enjoy the fact that I'm a local small business that lives down the road. They can call me up and ask me a question personally and not have to worry about getting shunted to a large call center in a foreign country.

There are thousands of Wireless ISPs around the country helping to provide service to everyone who the big telcos don't think they can profit enough from. Look hard enough and I bet there's already a WISP servicing your area.

The biggest issue is how federal funding is handed out to rural ISPs. The FCC determines broadband coverage based on zip codes the big providers give them. That means even though Verizon has DSL in the nearest town to me, they only cover about 200 houses within 1/4 mile -- everyone else outside that is considered covered by the FCC even though they can't get service. I can't get a RUS Grant because my coverage area is already "covered" by another provider.

I'm not sure where you got that idea about corn prices. It would actually be nice if the demand for corn DID go up so we could end some of the subsidies here in the US.

Currently the only way it's at all profitable to grow corn is if the USDA pays you to do it. The USDA also pays farmers NOT to grow corn because we produce too much of it.

We stopped growing corn on our beef farm in the early 90's since it was cheaper to just buy corn and make only hay.

Anyway, back on topic, I think the major benefit of these batteries is no more heavy metals in the groundwater. The source of the sugar used is pretty irrelevant.

When I studied soil science many years ago, I was told that soil, by definition, has to have undergone biological modification (see "What is Soil"). So there is no Martian soil unless there are, or have been, organisms on Mars.

At 2,000 gallons per acre (presumably per annum), you would need 73 million acres of land to meet these needs. According to the CIA Factbook, the USA has an area of 9,826,630 square kilometres, which works out to 2428213150 acres.

It may be more relevant to compare that with our current cropland use, to demonstrate how much of a change that would be. See USDA. We have somewhere around 230Million acres of cropland in use, domestically. So that works out to about 1/3 of our CURRENT harvested cropland use that would need to be diverted to fuel production, assuming all the previous calculations to be somewhat true.

So that is still feasible. Remembers, those figures are just current use. We can support the use of a lot more of US land than we currently do for agriculture

Some more recent data, apparently our government doesn't update this but every 5 years: USDA 2002 Ag Census. Those figures report that we have 938 Million acres currently available in farms. That census also reports we use almost 60 million acres just for grazing livestock. That's awfully close to the 73 million quoted previously. The sky is falling argument of we CANNOT afford the land use or water use fails.

At 2,000 gallons per acre (presumably per annum), you would need 73 million acres of land to meet these needs. According to the CIA Factbook, the USA has an area of 9,826,630 square kilometres, which works out to 2428213150 acres.

It may be more relevant to compare that with our current cropland use, to demonstrate how much of a change that would be. See USDA. We have somewhere around 230Million acres of cropland in use, domestically. So that works out to about 1/3 of our CURRENT harvested cropland use that would need to be diverted to fuel production, assuming all the previous calculations to be somewhat true.

So that is still feasible. Remembers, those figures are just current use. We can support the use of a lot more of US land than we currently do for agriculture

Some more recent data, apparently our government doesn't update this but every 5 years: USDA 2002 Ag Census. Those figures report that we have 938 Million acres currently available in farms. That census also reports we use almost 60 million acres just for grazing livestock. That's awfully close to the 73 million quoted previously. The sky is falling argument of we CANNOT afford the land use or water use fails.

HFCS is not the problem. The problem is simple, too many calories in, too few calories out.

HFCS is no worse for you than sucrose, and because it is sweeter than cane sugar per calorie, it may even be better.

The real answer is that calorie consumption has increase over 20 percent since 1980, and physical activity has probably decreased during the same period.

Check the graph on page 3:

http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/FoodReview/DE C2002/frvol25i3a.pdf

People always like to place blame on external target rather than looking at the real problem, that people eat too much. It's easy to blame HFCS (though its no worse than sugar) or fatty foods (though many countries eat much more fat than we do yet don't get fat). Much harder to look at the situation honestly and say that we are a bunch of lazy gluttons.

'It's all the fault of Nixon and that damned HFCS!' Is a great feelgood answer that doesn't hurt anyones feelings, but it simply isn't the truth.

Good summary. The costs of upgrading wiring are not very well correlated to population density in the first place.

Dragging optical fibre to some lone hut on the top of a mountain, as you put it, is not cost effective, but neither is opening up the streets of a European town centre with streets just wide enough for cars: the indirect costs for traffic and retail are huge. The sweet spot is in the middle: cheapest is wiring up apartment buildings and suburban neighbourhoods with wide streets, and the US has lots of those while many European countries have more townhouses in narrow streets proportionally.

Population density maps are not finegrained enough to make the distinction in the first place. Even this USDA definition of rural misclassifies walled towns in the Netherlands consisting solely of townhouses that I know of as "rural", while it classifies much bigger sprawled villages nearby as "urban" even though these "urban" areas actually depend on the "rural" town for services. (That the villages grow in population and the town does not is typically an effect of the wall.) Wiring up the walled town with its narrow streets and busy traffic is going to be more expensive than wiring up the villages.

Corn growers intend to plant 90.5 million acres of corn for all purposes in 2007, up 15 percent from 2006 and 11 percent higher than 2005. If realized this would be the highest acreage since 1944, when 95.5 million acres were planted for all purposes.

http://www.usda.gov/oce/reports/energy/net_energy_ balance.pdf

From the table on page 5 ... the energy output is 1.02 to 1.10 times the input if you only look at ethanol.

Here's another:

http://www.usda.gov/oce/reports/energy/aer-814.pdf

This one's conclusions have 1.34 as the ratio.

Corn is not the problem, converting corn sugar into ethanol. That's where 2/3 of the energy used goes.

http://www.usda.gov/oce/reports/energy/net_energy_ balance.pdf

From the table on page 5 ... the energy output is 1.02 to 1.10 times the input if you only look at ethanol.

Here's another:

http://www.usda.gov/oce/reports/energy/aer-814.pdf

This one's conclusions have 1.34 as the ratio.

Corn is not the problem, converting corn sugar into ethanol. That's where 2/3 of the energy used goes.

It's sugar beets. too.

Vat-grown, or printed, meat products are produced using the same basic techniques as other forms of printed tissue culture. Tissue engineering of this type was first developed for medical use in the production of autologous tissue for organ replacement. However this sort of tissue culture was soon found to be useful for the direct production of meat for food on spacecraft and habitats in deep space. See bioforgery.

To achieve the goal of meat production, muscle and other flesh cells are grown on a specially constructed biopolymer scaffold, which replicates the natural extracellular matrix found in living animals. This scaffold is generally printed using a rapid 3d printer device, although several other related techniques such as foaming and self-assembly are also used. Cultured cells are then implanted into the scaffolding, and these cells are induced to bind together into muscle-like or vascular tissue. Once the meat block, known as `slab', is established, the tissue is supplied with nutrients and allowed to grow by as much as 400% by volume before harvesting. To ensure the slab has a healthy texture it is stimulated into regular contractions, simulating exercise; the slab is attached at each end to strain gauges to measure the force of contraction. Each slab is connected to a generous supply of nutrient fluid often closely resembling blood.

Matter compilers in meat factories to produce foods. So, this looks like an interesting area of thought to explore further. Starting with cell culture techniques would be the smart thing to do, then confirming that we can identify particularly nutritious cells, and then working on some tissue growth techniques. Maybe this will start with burn victims?

Artificial cells, tissues, organs compilation,
Background notes on tissue engineering,
Engineering human tissue (paper),
An odd government website,
Obligatory Wikipedia article linkage,
Organ printing,
This source is claiming lab-grown meat in five years,
Fetal farming (what?),
New-Harvest.org for bringing cultivated meat closer to reality,

Vat-grown, or printed, meat products are produced using the same basic techniques as other forms of printed tissue culture. Tissue engineering of this type was first developed for medical use in the production of autologous tissue for organ replacement. However this sort of tissue culture was soon found to be useful for the direct production of meat for food on spacecraft and habitats in deep space. See bioforgery.

To achieve the goal of meat production, muscle and other flesh cells are grown on a specially constructed biopolymer scaffold, which replicates the natural extracellular matrix found in living animals. This scaffold is generally printed using a rapid 3d printer device, although several other related techniques such as foaming and self-assembly are also used. Cultured cells are then implanted into the scaffolding, and these cells are induced to bind together into muscle-like or vascular tissue. Once the meat block, known as `slab', is established, the tissue is supplied with nutrients and allowed to grow by as much as 400% by volume before harvesting. To ensure the slab has a healthy texture it is stimulated into regular contractions, simulating exercise; the slab is attached at each end to strain gauges to measure the force of contraction. Each slab is connected to a generous supply of nutrient fluid often closely resembling blood.

Matter compilers in meat factories to produce foods. So, this looks like an interesting area of thought to explore further. Starting with cell culture techniques would be the smart thing to do, then confirming that we can identify particularly nutritious cells, and then working on some tissue growth techniques. Maybe this will start with burn victims?

Artificial cells, tissues, organs compilation,
Background notes on tissue engineering,
Engineering human tissue (paper),
An odd government website,
Obligatory Wikipedia article linkage,
Organ printing,
This source is claiming lab-grown meat in five years,
Fetal farming (what?),
New-Harvest.org for bringing cultivated meat closer to reality,

Um, no. Sure, biological processes preserve the body - but freezing stops both those processes, AND the processes that cause decay - also biological processes.

But to address your freezer question:
http://www.fsis.usda.gov/Fact_Sheets/2005_Hotline_ Planner_Text/index.asp

"From a safety standpoint, you can keep meat or poultry in the freezer indefinitely"


This woolly mammoth was still in good shape after 23,000 years in the cooler. They even found plant matter around the frozen beast, still green.

For a couple of reasons. Canada leeches off the trans-continental backbone that was built in the US and over 80% of Canadians live in urban areas which is very similar to that of the US. A great rural Canada is a myth. So is the great rural US. The numbers are similar which is not surprising. The higher position of Canada is probably due to having their broadband companies be a little less coercive.

It's a seed plant, so it reproduces sexually. Unless the species itself has inbred to the point of no variation in their DNA (like what the leopard is approaching), one disease or parasite or [insert bane here] would have wiped them out years ago. Even, let's go far as to say their DNA was SO PERFECT that it had already taken into account any potential threat, past, present AND future...then every single plant would be the same...why would it fight any individual from the same species?

My point being, it's not DNA that drives this. Of course, everything ultimately is (and that's also not to imply that plants have a conscious,) but I wouldn't be surprised if they are programmed to compete, while favoring (and by not hurting, helping) a similar genetic structure (survival of the fittest and all!)

Their revenue? The Native Americans only share a duopoly on gambling because they're able to take advantage of regulatory arbitrage and states haven't figured out that they'd collect more profit from taxes on privately-run gambling. They're no more entitled to it than AWB was entitled to export all Australian wheat or Carlos Slim is entitled to pwn Mexicans' wallets.

And your suggestion to direct revenue from gambling taxes to education is faulty -- that's likely to be a federal tax, and we have too much federal involvement in education as is. (No Child Left Untested, anyone?)

(Full disclosure: I work for the federal government. That means I have a heightened awareness of how good we are at pissing away taxpayer dollars.)

The question is - how many gas stations are there and how many grocery stores are there.

Right now, the US consumes about 9.3M barrels (390M gallons) of gasoline per day. That's per capita, annual consumption of about 468 gallons (3000 pounds) per year. By comparison, in 2004, US consumers bought 192 pounds of grains per person.

You're not going to "fill up" your car at the grocery store the way grocery stores exist now.

Whose bright idea was it to color that map in those particular shades of red and blue? Interesting how it makes the perennially urban areas pale into insignificance, isn't it?

If you're thinking, "It's not supposed to be a population density map, it's supposed to draw the eye to areas that are becoming more rural and less rural", then answer this question: why use the colors blue and red?

Politics much?

People will always need to eat, but that doesn't mean they will always need you to be involved. The share of the US population living on farms has plummeted even as malnutrition has vanished.

http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/EIB3/charts.h tm#fig1

"...I think the real question is not just whether revenue increased or decreased, but what it did in relation to the rest of the economy."

Why? Why does revenue as a percentage of GDP matter more than revenue per capita in constant dollars? This is a basic disagreement on values, somewhere.

As for actual data, taking the values from your second link, apply them to the gdp by year in chained dollars found at Bureau of Economic Analysis and you can get a good evidence that yes, government revenue was higher in 1985 than in 1981 (although not in intervening years). I also took the numbers from here to do the per capita calculations, and got a similar result. To be fair, the GP was wrong, revenue did drop for a few years. If you're wondering, I suggested per capita in order to account for population growth as a factor in econmic growth.

Of course, this whole discussion is predicated on the idea that the goal is to maximize government revenue, which goes back to a difference in basic values again.

You can find the official recommended intake amounts here though. There is 400 IU of vitamin D added to fortified milk (ref, so the article is recommending that one consume 1200 IU, but if you check the offical recommendations I linked to you can see they say 200 is enough. So they are saying the min. intake is currently too low, not just that people don't consume or synthesize enough due to inadequate sunlight.

        Another thing I found out is that you can't get an optimal amount of Vitamin D from supplements because it is all preformed vitamin D so your blood levels will track your intake, and nobody really knows exactly how much is best. When skin gets exposed to sunlight on the other hand, the vitamin D is stored and released appropriately to maintain the optimum concentration (assuming there's enough sunlight).....

Who said they were waiting to see that too much vitamin D causes some other serious illness? It causes "hypercalcemia", at least. If you were to consume a bottle of vitamin D supplements that would be lethal, if my memory serves correctly (and it's not a really small bottle). A bottle of halibut liver oil would also do it, though the vitamin A would get you first (In fact vitamin A overdose from consuming livers is how some arctic explorers died).

Can anyone make a useful comment about those sunlamp things, *please*? Do they output enough UV for vitamin D production? I have read that UV exposure below a certain intensity produces no vitamin d at all (it gets destroyed as a fast as it can be produced), but I don't remember the threshhold :(.... You also need UVB for vitamin D production, and I think most "sunlamps" or tanning lamps produce mostly UVA, as that can produce a tan but not a burn very easily. I think that would be the optimum solution - just point one of those sunlamp things at my chair and have it turn on for 15 minutes a day when I'm working. Apparently exposure of the face and forearms only, for 15 minutes at noon with clear skies at 75 degrees north, facing the sun, 3 times a week, is enough. Try getting a straighter answer from any other source - no, I had to cobble that together myself from the almost uselessly vauge recommendations authorities spit out and relative uvb intensities at my latitude.... to bad I forget the numbers I used. If you are behind a window it reduces the intensity of UVB by only about 10 percent. After 15 minutes or so the skin actually stops producing vitamin D so there's no point in exposing a specific area of skin for more than than amount of time in one day for this purpose. I think it takes at least 1 day to reset, but good luck finding that sort of thing out from medical literature...... I just want some dam numbers! If you get an "erythmal" exposure, that is past the saturation point. That's when your skin turns slightly pink, - from the UV, not the heat mind you-, and takes about 15 minutes in full sunlight.

They are being cut done for farmland since those farmers use suboptimal farming techniques which necessitate burning through a lot of the land.

I'd like to see something to backup those assertions. My understanding is that farmland has been decreasing in the US for a long time. According to USDA as of 2003:

The Nation's cropland acreage declined from 420 million acres in 1982 to 368 million acres in 2003, a decrease of about 12 percent. The net decline between 1997 and 2003 was 8 million acres, or about 2 percent.

Here's an article indicating the same thing is happening in China:

"The amount of land dedicated to grain production is expected to continue shrinking in the years ahead, but (farm lands) will still have to produce a minimum of 500 million tons to feed China in 2010," the China Daily said.

Not that I particularly care for food raised on modern farms, but it remains that less and less land is producing more and more food.

I think you have to consider what exactly we're going to do in this country if we start importing everything.

Assuming you meant "sugar" where you said "everything", we could always export all our corn to Mexico.

I am always amused by those who think that the U.S. has no natural comparative advantages in trade (a la Ricardo theory). We're still the most innovative economy on the planet. We'll find something else to do besides growing corn, if it comes to that.

So I go to apply for food stamps to feed my family, it's not based on your monthly earnings, but rather HOW MUCH YOU MAKE AN HOUR, becuase of this I'm left wondering if I wouldn't be better off working in fast food.

That's a messed up system. Still, it looks like the federal system is a monthly income level

Still, while your situation is tough, there is assistance out there as you mentioned. Your situation is difficult, as while you're making more than minimum wage; you're still 'underemployed' in the sense that you're working less than 40 hours/week.

I'd personally recommend trying to branch out a bit. Even something piecework could help. I'd see if you could find a scholarship.

This article is full of errors. Furthermore, the U.S. is a net importer of food. USA is net Exporter of food (look http://www.ers.usda.gov/Data/FATUS/), through USA is running huge deficit in other trade items. Corn price is directly connected to prices of most USA consumed food. Corn is exported in volume about 21 mln. ton a month and is dominating food export item for USA. Second place is Soybeans. Currently alcohol is made from corn, this situation becoming fixed by agriculture politics and subsidies, all other options like cellulose alcohol are just fairy tales. Corn prices raised and continue to rise already. There is no "if" here. Rising demand for corn from subsidies leads to increase of production from less optimal fields and to switching from other cultures and so to increased corn (and other food) costs and prices, not to decreased waste.

Oh you betcha! Well, not Porky the individual (sample being hard to come by), but the swine genome project is well underway:

http://www.marc.usda.gov/genome/swine/swine.html

(just the first link I could find)

Interestingly enough, there's a ton of genetic work and application being done in the agricultural community (and I don't just mean RoundUp Ready Maize). The breeders are completely tuned in on things like biomarkers and what that means for their work.

Tin foil hat: Who is number 3 in internet search? What corporation has at least twice donated $1000-that we know of- to Brad Miller's election/re-election campaigns. The CEO of what major S/W companny has [supposedly] threatened to "fucking kill Google"? Well, this won't kill Google, but every little bit of slime helps. Nah, that's a little too wild. ;-)

Seriously, as for why Google did it, being a New Awlins expatriate (since 1980), I'd guess that someone in state and/or local government "finagled" enough to get Google to change it. Finagling could involve almost anything. This just has the aura/aroma of good old-fashioned has Louisiana politickin' to it. La. pollies have been involved in "dubious"real estate deals and developments as long as I can remember (back to the 1950s). In the early 1980s people in certain areas kept coming home to find smoking craters where their houses had been. Some subdivisions got built by putting a little fill dirt on what is locally known as "coffee grounds." Coffee gronds are beds of semi-decomposed vegetation of marshy/swampy enviornments, and they can be several feet thick like Maurepas Muck. The houses settled ... gas pipes broke ... boom! I follow the local news from there on a daily basis which can be found at WWL (870 - AM, 50,000 watts). Nothing much has changed since 1980.

Im not sure I undstand your kneejerk outrage.

Half of all cuba's exports earnings are from sugar. Cuba used to supply 35% of the world's sugar, but now only 10% (though that's still a lot for a little island). The decline is primarily due to the price of sugar dropping 58%. Therefore if sugar was used for ethanol, it's price would increase like corn's price is doing now, and Cuba's sugar exports would approach previous highs.

Which is all to say, there's not really anything wrong with that. Sugar is better at making ethanol than corn by a longshot, and there's nothing wrong with a little national self interest, even from zombie communists :P

To start off, God I wish I didn't need the internet. I'd get rid of it so fast. I'd kill to get back all the time I coulda spent doing real work, or reading, or being outside spent instead spent on Slashdot. Honestly, I have some envy for people that actually don't need it. You can do what you really have to do at work or the library. So I don't think lack of the internet is any sign of poverty in america or whatever.

BUT

There is honest-to-god food insecurity in the US. Yeah I mean that all those poor people living in the lap of luxury don't know where their next meal is coming from, or have to choose between food and rent. And just cus you don't see them from the freeway on your commute from suburbia to office park doesn't mean they don't exist. What's all the more fucked up about it is that the problem is about 10 times worse here than in every other industrialized country, because American politicians are far more interested in invading foreign countries and pork for their districts than giving a f--- about starving people.

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?ne wsid=32800
http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/err11/

Is it too far out of line to think about using a non-petroleum based oil? They do make special application hydraulic oils made from vegetable/tree oil. Sure, it's a lot more expensive and maybe a little inferior in comparison to its petroleum equivalent, but it's cheap insurance. That way when does leak or fail, the environmental impact would be much less.

The red juice from a steak is not blood.

Uh, yeah it is. What the hell do you think it is?

Myoglobin, a protein, is responsible for the majority of the red color. Myoglobin doesn't circulate in the blood but is fixed in the tissue cells and is purplish in color. When it is mixed with oxygen, it becomes oxymyoglobin and produces a bright red color. The remaining color comes from the hemoglobin which occurs mainly in the circulating blood, but a small amount can be found in the tissues after slaughter.

Your butterfly link is to research conducted under artificial conditions which do not reflect the level of exposure at a real farm. This anti-GMO lie has long been debunked for the fabrication it really is. See the USDA for more.

My point was that every generation idealizes the past and looks down on future generations for some reason

You just did it again by portraying the world a few generations ago as made up almost entirely of farmers and blue collar workers

"California leads the nation in agricultural production, followed by Texas, Iowa, Kansas and Nebraska, according to the 1992 Census of Agriculture"

http://www.nass.usda.gov/Census_of_Agriculture/ind ex.asp

See This map for why it really IS about population density. Canada, pshaw, sure they have a lot of land, but they have almost no one in 90% of it. It certainly looks like almost all of Candada's population is within 200km of the US border. Norway, Sweden, and Finland are in the same boat...

This is one of the stupider more vapid "analysis" articles..

Sorry for the Anonymous, I left my password at home...

Maybe we should use switch grass.

Ten times as many gallons / ton, and grows like the weed that it is!

The National Center for Genetic Resources Preservation (NCGRP) conserves genetic resources of crops and animals important to US agriculture and landscapes. Preservation of genetic diversity in ex situ genebanks such as NCGRP is important for conservation of biological diversity and utilization of genetic resources for economic and environmental sustainability. Formerly called the National Seed Storage Laboratory (NSSL), our facility changed its name in 2001 to reflect an expanded mission beyond seed storage. In addition to being a seed bank, NCGRP is a repository for animal genetic resources in the form of semen and plant genetic resources in the form of graftable buds or in vitro plantlets. Genetic resources are preserved using state-of-the-art technology that often involves cryogenics. A research team with cryobiology expertise works to develop cryopreservation technologies.

In my country in Europe we make sugar out of beets and we even export it and make money off of it. If a 3rd world country like mine can do it, U.S. sure can, so why is it fixated on sugar cane when beets are easy to grow?


I think they produce a beet or two here in the US:

"U.S. farmers produced 33 million tons of sugar beets on 1.6 million acres in 2000, versus 28 million tons of sugar beets on 1.4 million acres in 1990"

http://www.ers.usda.gov/AmberWaves/February05/Find ings/Sugarbeets.htm

Yes, I'm afraid US food is dead. Go to any US supermarket and all you see is food in plastic bags.

Man I miss the open air market in Gif sur Yvette.

I suggest investing in crop science to produce more food with the same land resources. It's worked here.

then we'll be paying $6/lb for carrots. The inflationary pressure would literally starve millions of people born here and the welfare costs would skyrocket.

No, we wouldn't. Farm labor costs are a relatively small portion of food costs. Wages could go up dramatically, and the average person would see only a small increaase in their grocery bill. I saw some good statistics on this somewhere, and it was clear that we don't need illegal aliens to keep us from starving. I don't have the source for those particular statistics, but it's not too hard to do a quick and dirty calculation to see this for yourself, using the numbers from the USDA.

Note that about 2 percent of the total employment in the US is in production or farm inputs. That's 2 percent of about 165 million people employed. Let's say that, if we fired all the illegal immigrants and replaced them with legal workers, we'd have to pay every farm-related worker an average of $10,000 extra a year (probably a big overestimate). Add that up, then divide it by the 300 million people in the country, and you get an extra $9 per month per person for groceries (on average--poor people will probably see a smaller increase). Not great, but hardly a disaster. Saying people are going to starve because of an extra $9 a month on their grocery bill is a bit hyperbolic, don't you think?