A study from Ernst and Young on the likelihood of new retirees outliving their financial aspects was discussed in a conference call this afternoon. Joe Reali, chairman of Americans for Secure Retirement, claimed the study found that the majority of middle class retirees will outlive their retirement benefits.

According to Tom Neubig, who represented Ernst and Young, 6 of ten new retirees will not be able to maintain their current standard of living when drawing from available retirement resources, and many will be forced to cut their spending during retirement by about one third. He went on to say that those retiring with a guaranteed source of income like a structured payment package will fare much better than others.

Larry Mitchell, director of legislative affairs for the American Corn Growers Association, added that many who work in farming are forced to take on additional jobs to earn income due to financial worries. Most of these jobs offer little or no retirement benefits. As such, farm workers across the nation are having an increasingly difficult time earning adequate retirement benefits, and with the release of this new study the situation appears only to be getting worse.

Corn, apparently, is many things. It is animal feed, human food, and ethanol. I spoke with George Chadima in Fairfax, a farm owner near Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Excessive moisture has caused the nitrogen to be leeched from the soil, which is requiring farmers to buy biologically active fertilizer. The corn that was planted already has been “drowned” by water pooling in areas, and much of the rest was also damaged by a recent hailstorm. Crops, he said, would probably yield 75-80% of what they normally do.

I was shown a warehouse that housed large containers of soybeans yet to be planted. The planting schedule is three weeks behind already due to the weather, and hopefully, he said, they’ll be able to plant within the next couple of days. This is happening to many farmers in Iowa, and the result is going to mean higher prices- in everything.

Corn prices, of course, will go up, since using corn for “human food” or exporting it elsewhere, essentially removes corn from the chain of production. Ethanol, surprisingly, does not create that problem, because after the grain alcohol is removed there are still co-products from the corn, such as animal feed, plastics, and oils. The chain of production includes feeding that corn to animals, and then using the byproducts as fertilizer. Because it is costing more to harvest the corn, and there will be less of it, this will cause beef prices to rise.