For farmers who raise corn, the ethanol boom has been a long time coming.
The Delmarva Peninsula lies just inland from the swanky beach hotels along the Maryland coast. It's green and pool-table flat, and its soil has fed Americans for more than 300 years.
For about 120 of those years, the Hutchison family has farmed here. They've raised soybeans, hogs and even a crop called kenaf, used to make paper.
Right now, corn is the hot crop, and Robert Hutchison's silos are bursting with shelled corn that's drying.
"We start selling January, February, March, and we'll empty our tanks by June," he said.
Corn farmers such as Hutchison are getting about $4 a bushel.
He says these high corn prices — pushed up in part by the demand for ethanol fuel — have farmers eager to buy seed.
"I sell seed corn as part of my other business," he said. "Every farmer I go to is planting additional acres of corn."
President Bush set the goal that in 10 years, Americans would replace one-fifth of the gasoline they use with ethanol.
That goal could also reshape the farm economy in unexpected ways.
Hutchison's a big fan of ethanol — but it also worries him and other farmers in the Delmarva Peninsula. They don't sell much corn to ethanol distilleries; their most important customers are hog and poultry producers.
"They are our No. 1 user of grain. We need to be concerned about that, and they need to remain viable," he said. "This whole thing will have to shake out to readjustment of prices and uses of grain."
Farmers here are happy to get record prices for corn, but they don't want to alienate the livestock producers, who are unhappy about the way ethanol is pushing up corn prices. And if those prices go too high, the livestock growers will switch to another kind of feed.
The challenge, he says, is find a way to keep feeding the new ethanol market without losing his old customers.
The ripple effects of higher demand for corn could reach far and wide. Pricier corn could mean pricier bacon, pricier steak, pricier Coke – because it uses corn syrup.
And an ethanol boom could have environmental costs, too. Elizabeth Marshall, an energy economist with the World Resources Institute in Washington, D.C., notes that corn uses a lot of fertilizer and a lot of herbicides. These have damaged rivers, lakes and especially the Chesapeake Bay along the Delmarva Peninsula. She says if the country wants more ethanol, it should help farmers find friendlier ways to grow corn and other crops in less harmful ways.
"A lot of people are looking for alternatives, including corn growers, but it's a very risky field," Marshall said. "You can't experiment with new technologies year-to-year and expect to stay in business if you hit a really bad year."
Delmarva farmer Robert Hutchison is already taking that risk, however.
Hutchison is growing a new kind of crop for the ethanol market — barley.
Most barley has a tough seed-hull that ethanol distilleries can't handle. So Hutchison is growing an experimental hull-less barley — the hull drops off during harvest. On a bumpy ride out to his test field, Hutchison says his first job is to persuade farmers to grow it.
"Part of the challenge of doing this ethanol plan is making sure we could pay the farmer enough additional that he would still net out the same, or more, as he would growing conventional barley," Hutchison says.
The idea is that farmers could grow winter barley for the ethanol market and summer corn to keep the chickens and hogs fat and happy. Moreover, barley keeps soil from blowing away in the winter, and sucks up excess fertilizer that might otherwise run into local waterways.
Hutchison says his hull-less barley is a gamble, but the ethanol boom has helped him make more from his corn crop than he has in decades.
"It's been since the '70s since I've been able to say farming is really profitable beyond just barely making a living and squeaking by."
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7426827
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