Less peanut butter sandwiches in the future? And watermelon ethanol??

Little may you know that there is a peanut shortage in the U.S. currently. But if you're not unlike many of the college students out there, a large part of your sustenance depends upon peanut butter. According to NPR's article it is likely we're going to see quite an increase in the regular price of peanut butter.  The causes of this shortage are drought conditions and the price of cotton. Alot of farmers planted less peanut plants because the price of cotton was higher and they would make more of a profit off of the cotton than the peanut butter. And the peanut plants that did get planted are having trouble thriving with the drought conditions of the southeast and southwest. For 2011 the projected amount of U.S. peanut supply is 5.1 billion pounds - which is the lowest it's been since 2003. This peanut butter shortage has arrived at an unfortunate time; since the economy has been in a recession the amount of peanut butter consumption has increased. People use it because it's high in protein and a cheap alternative to meat. Hopefully we'll all still be able to have our own peanut butter and jelly time in the future.

Also, an interesting article I read in National Geographic recently talked about making ethanol out of watermelon juice. What? When I was in Ecuador this summer, one of my favorite juices they served us was watermelon juice - it was delicious and it was pink! So the article talked about when farmers plant watermelons there are some that grow and are deformed or scarred - farmers don't want to sell these so they just leave them on the vine. When researchers were experimenting with different methods of extracting antioxidants from the watermelons they discovered that the waste sugary fluid could possibly be used as a biofuel. They moved their research to a laboratory and discovered that it could definitely serve as ethanol. Farmers could produce it and then use it to run things on their farm. Or they could try to sell it. The main researcher, Wayne Fish, who worked on the project said that he thought it would make the most economic sense to have a mobile brewery that traveled from farm to farm to make the ethanol. Either way, sounds like a sweet source of fuel to me.