The handful of yellow dent corn that Fayette County farmer Richard Burd keeps in an old coffee can in his office doesn't look like something that could affect the price of gas at GetGo or the cost of a chicken at Shop 'n Save.

Yet the small, hard nuggets that feed poultry as well as make fuel have become a flashpoint for a debate over the future of the nation's energy policies vs. the rising cost of feeding a family.

A chicken company in Texas this month blamed the government's "misguided ethanol policy" in part for rising corn prices. And a grocery industry group complained all-time high corn prices were a factor in milk, meat and bread prices rising faster than inflation.

Not everyone is buying it.

"Corn is being blamed for, good grief, every malady," said Mr. Burd in disgust. "Probably kids breaking out in acne is because of corn prices."

Well, perhaps not quite that. But decisions being made on the future of ethanol and other biofuels aren't just the stuff of international policy, congressional hearings and Midwest farm news.

In Western Pennsylvania, many have a stake in the discussion, from the region's farmers to food companies such as the H.J. Heinz Co. to investors in ethanol plants to consumers shopping for groceries.

Corn prices aren't the only thing going up lately but the government's role makes it a topic of some controversy.

Ethanol has been around for decades but oil dominated the nation's energy choices because it was easy to use and the price was right. But governments moved to encourage alternative energy development, including subsidies for corn-based ethanol.

It worked so well that rising demand was seen as a driving factor behind the spike in corn prices toward the end of 2006. Farmers responded by producing one of the largest corn crops since World War II. Typically, a bumper crop would drive prices down. But corn prices continued to rise.

Ethanol was part of the picture. So was the falling value of the U.S. dollar and the growing affluence of countries such as China that now can afford to buy American grain to feed livestock. Speculators who aren't finding a lot to like on Wall Street also may be bidding up prices. Buying corn for $4 a bushel and reselling it for $6 can mean a nice return.

If it were just corn going up, it might not be a big deal. But the price hikes have come against a backdrop of rising oil prices, a surge in wheat demand, tightening credit and other economic issues.

Food companies and ethanol plants worry corn prices will stay high and throw their bottom line out of whack, while grain farmers -- watching seed, fertilizer and crop insurance costs soar -- worry prices won't hold up until harvest. Consumers just worry.

On days like March 31, the phones never stopped ringing at the Deerfield, Ohio, offices of Deerfield Farms Services. That's when the annual predictions on what the nation's farmers plan to plant came out of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Agricultural Statistics Service.

"Everybody wants to know what I think the markets are going to do," said Jenifer Weaver, grain department manager. She laughed. If she knew that, she said, she'd be wealthy and spending the winter months in a balmy climate.

Deerfield Farms is a midsize country elevator that will handle more than 5 million bushels of corn, soybeans and wheat this year, much of it grown in fields in Ohio and Pennsylvania. It has grain elevators in five locations, including in New Wilmington.

Farmers have the choice of selling directly to end users, such as pet food plants or nearby dairy farms, or doing deals with businesses like Deerfield Farms that turn around and sell to the commodity on the Chicago Board of Trade.

By the end of April, Mr. Burd was planning to start putting in corn seed, a 10-day job that would quickly give way to the 10-day task of planting soybeans. His Uniontown farm includes about 1,700 acres spread in patches over a several mile area.

Two years ago, corn was selling around $2 a bushel and it was difficult to cover costs. At that rate, he figured he'd make it one more year and then be wiped out. "There was a lot of us in that boat."

Then the market took off. Prices shot up and the spike lasted into 2007 when, thanks to cool nights and warm days, his Fayette County fields overflowed. Corn yields were up 15 percent over average and soybeans up 25 percent. "It's kind of like, 'Wow, this is great. Maybe I can pay some bills,'" he said.

This year feels like one of riskiest he's seen during his three decades in the business. Prices for his mix of crops have about doubled since the fall of 2006. "Unfortunately, my inputs have more than doubled." Inputs is the term used for things such as seed and fertilizer. He estimates fertilizer costs are up more than 200 percent.

Mr. Burd doesn't change crop mix much year to year, even as prices rise and fall. Soybeans do good things for the soil and his budget so he plants those in about half of his acres, rotating that mainly with a corn crop. He grows some wheat, too.

He also spends a lot of time trying to track what's going on around the world. He attends seminars and reads anything he can to understand how his patch of earth will be affected by the rise of the middle class in China, a drought in Australia, the value of the dollar and a backlash against biofuels as the world suffers food shortages.

Farmers can sell the right to crops that they haven't grown yet or they can hold onto unsold product searching for the right moment to sell. "We have one and half years to market a crop," he said. "We have six months to grow it."

Mr. Burd thinks blaming biofuels for the world's problems is a convenient excuse. He'd like to see continued support for ethanol, which gives farmers another place to sell a crop that they've typically produced in surplus.

Not all farmers agree. At a recent county farm bureau meeting, he ended up in an argument with a friend convinced ethanol production had caused hikes in corn prices that were hurting his dairy farm operation.

Running a sausage plant means buying a lot of corn-fed hogs. Which might help explain why Charles S. Armitage isn't happy. "The government in all its wisdom interfered with business again," he said flatly.

The owner of Uncle Charley's Sausages in Vandergrift, Westmoreland County, produces sausage for sale in Western Pennsylvania, as well as in parts of West Virginia, Ohio, New York and Maryland. He buys meat from producers in Ohio and Illinois.

At the moment, pork prices aren't too bad. Mr. Armitage expects that to change. "Meat is going to be going up. By the end of summer, it's going to be very high."

For now, prices are down because producers are trimming their herds and sending more meat to market. Smithfield Foods Inc. announced in February plans to reduce its U.S. sow herd by 4 to 5 percent. "Grain costs continue at record levels, with the potential of escalating, given the current U.S. government policy favoring corn for ethanol," said Chief Executive Officer C. Larry Pope, in a prepared statement.

In March and again in April, Pilgrim's Pride moved to reduce chicken processing capacity. The company's top executive cited feed-ingredient costs due largely to "the U.S. government's ill-advised policy of providing generous federal subsidies to corn-based ethanol blenders."

In a recent report, Credit Suisse analyst Robert Moskow wrote that chicken and red meat supplies in cold storage were up. "Both chicken and pork producers have a lot of cutting to do this year if they are going to improve the price environment for their commodity meats."

When herd sizes drop, Mr. Armitage expects his costs will go up in a hurry.

Meanwhile, ethanol plants have been seeded all over the region. Site clearing has been done for a project in Westmoreland County. Development is under way for another in Harrison County, Ohio, not far from Steubenville. A operation headquartered on McKnight Road is working toward opening plants in Aliquippa and Curwensville.

"We still intend on starting construction midyear" for the Curwensville site, said Harry Joseph Cranston Jr., president of Consus Ethanol LLC and Sunnyside Ethanol LLC, in an e-mail response to the status of those projects. The Aliquippa project is in the process of pre-engineering in support of environmental permits.

Last year, the U.S. ethanol industry's capacity to produce the corn-based fuel rose by nearly 2 billion gallons to an annualized rate of more than 7.8 billion gallons, according to the Renewable Fuels Association. The group predicted another 4 billion gallons of capacity should come online this year.

In addition to fuel, corn-based ethanol plants produce a feed that can be used for livestock. The plant proposed for Harrison County is meant to have an adjacent dairy that will use the feed produced as a by-product there without unnecessary transportation costs.

The Pennsylvania Farm Bureau this month was out actively lobbying for continued state investment in biofuels, noting other states have supported such growth. All of the regional developments have had government support.

Rising corn prices don't help ethanol producers any more than they do livestock companies, and development of new plants may slow nationally. "You can't make a $3 product out of a $7 product," said Nathaniel Doyno, co-founder of Steel City Biofuels, a nonprofit advocating for production and use of biofuels in southwestern Pennsylvania.

Eventually, he believes that plants built during this wave of development will be adapted for use with other types of renewable resources, such as an inedible crop that can be grown on marginal land. Just this past week, developers announced plans for another plant in Westmoreland that would run on waste products.

But Mr. Doyno has been glad to see entrepreneurs willing to venture into biofuels. "I'm very grateful that the corn industry stepped up and invested in ethanol infrastructure."

No one can argue that consumers are paying more at the grocery store and at the pump. Is one related to the other? The answer seems to be a complicated "yes" and "no."

About one-third of the national corn harvest is being used to make ethanol, according to Wally Tyner, a Purdue University professional of agricultural economics. Increasingly, fuel suppliers are mixing ethanol in the gas blends sold to consumers.

In a February presentation in Boston, Dr. Tyner said that when oil is running above $100 per barrel, as it is at the moment, ethanol production costs are close to gas production costs so the government's standards requiring companies to buy ethanol don't cost consumers much. When oil is down around $40 a barrel, ethanol costs more to produce from corn than gas costs to produce from crude oil.

If corn-based ethanol doesn't turn out to be the replacement for gas that some may have hoped, it could open pipelines to alternatives. Dr. Tyner advised that policies need to support the move to investment in cellulosic ethanol, which is made from grasses and waste materials, and could be more efficient than ethanol from corn.

When researchers at Texas A&M University recently looked into the food vs. fuel debate, the data they examined supported the argument that corn prices have had little to do with rising food costs. The farmer's share of the value of most retail products, especially those that involve processed foods, is lower than it was in 1970 and lower than labor costs.

A typical 12-pack of soda contains roughly 11 cents worth of corn when the price per bushel is $2.06. If the price rose to $4, the value of the corn in that soda would rise to 22 cents, the researchers said. While the impact on products such as eggs is heftier, it is still not as large as other factors, the researchers found.

They said each farm commodity has its own issues pushing prices up or down, from a drought in Australia that helped increase global demand for U.S. milk products to the poultry industry coping with a combination of higher feed costs and large production levels keeping costs down.

The market is constantly adapting to supply and demand signals, and higher prices have meant land that lay fallow has been brought back into crop production. Those interested in land-use policies hope rising interest in supplies of corn, soybeans and other agricultural products will spur better protection for good farm land that can so easily morph into a housing development or shopping center.

In the end, putting the spotlight on farmers may not be a bad thing. The World Bank this month said the move to biofuels has been a factor in high food prices that threaten global gains in overcoming poverty and malnutrition. But the organization also described higher grain prices as an opportunity to stimulate investments in the agricultural sector.