By ANN HINCH
Assistant Editor

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Encouraging wider ethanol availability across the United States will benefit Midwest farmers as well as ethanol producers and communities: This is the message Growth Energy and at least three states’ agricultural leaders are pushing as Congress wades through debate on clean-energy legislation.

“What we pay for oil goes well beyond what we actually pay for a barrel of oil,” Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland told reporters at a press conference July 6 in Columbus. Ethanol is cleaner than oil, he said, and domestic production stimulates the overall economy as well as the ag industry.

Besides, said Ohio Agriculture Director Robert Boggs, once the national economy recovers, gasoline will go back to the $4 a gallon it hit prior to September 2008. It is believed a higher blend of ethanol into the petroleum supply should pull down on that price.
Growth Energy, a national organization of businesses with interests in renewable biofuel, organized the Columbus press conference as well as two speeches in Indiana and Iowa by its co-chair, retired U.S. Army Gen. Wesley K. Clark. Clark talked about the importance of manufacturing more U.S. biofuel to replace a great deal of the crude we are importing and cut down on overseas military involvement.

In Ohio, there are five operating ethanol plants and one scheduled to reopen later this year, according to Mark Borer, president of the Ohio Ethanol Producers Assoc, a member of Growth Energy and general manager of the Leipsic, Ohio, POET ethanol plant.

He said one was shuttered and other new plants were halted because the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency hasn’t increased its blend wall from E10 to E15 – which corn and ethanol groups assert is safe for all gas engines.

“There was no ethanol (in Ohio) when Governor Strickland took office,” said Judd Templin of Growth Energy. “Now it produces over 400 million gallons a year.”

And, there’s capability for plenty more, say the state’s corn and ethanol groups. Before ethanol, Ohio exported 65 percent of its corn each year, said Dwayne Siekman, executive director of Ohio Corn. The notion that U.S. corn farmers will hit an upward limit on what they can realistically grow is not a problem right now, he said.
“We don’t see that ceiling on corn for quite some time,” Siekman said, adding that seed manufacturers are still depending on selling 300 bushels/acre-capable seed by the mid-2020s if not sooner. “There’s no shortage of corn … Ethanol was never designed to replace (all) gasoline.”

In Indianapolis the following day, Indiana Corn Marketing Council (ICMC) Executive Director Mark Henderson said farmers wouldn’t even have to “tear up” Conservation Reserve Program acres to grow enough corn to meet increasing ethanol needs. This year, Hoosier farmers are projected to harvest 900 million bushels and that’s expected to grow to nearly 1 billion in five years.

Of that 900 million, he said livestock feed will take fewer than 200 million bushels and is projected to remain a flat demand. Other processing, including ethanol, takes just over 300 million, leaving approximately 400 million bushels surplus this year.

Having a definite demand for that corn locally – such as ethanol – would cut down on a wide basis between cash and futures prices and benefit growers, he said.

Mark Walters, the retiring ICMC biofuels director, said the organization commissioned an ethanol study from Informa Economics, Inc. of Memphis, Tenn., completed in May. Indiana produces 7 percent of the nation’s 13 billion gallons of ethanol – “That’s something to be proud of, because Indiana was something of a late starter in ethanol,” he explained.

The state has 550 jobs dedicated to ethanol production right now, according to the study, and another 3,500 full-time jobs created indirectly by the industry.

“That’s a very conservative number, we feel,” Walters said.
Because of ethanol, corn growers get an average of an extra 10 cents per bushel, or $93 million more a year. Also, 30 percent of the state’s corn goes to ethanol and distillers dried grains production right now. The industry has also meant an extra $615 million in land equity for Indiana farmland, as well as another $150 million value in on-farm storage facilities.

“We need that kind of economic stimulus in the state,” Walters said. “Many of these communities are suffering, and this is a chance for them to pull themselves up.”

In Ohio, Siekman also considers ethanol “a bright and shining piece” of agriculture, because of how it’s helping local economies. He said ethanol helps support 150,000 jobs in the state’s corn industry and puts out fewer greenhouse gas emissions than the same volume of petroleum.

Even if a grower doesn’t sell their corn to a nearby ethanol plant, just the fact it is in operation will earn him or her an extra 20-25 cents per bushel in the wider grain market, Boggs explained. “It’s millions of dollars when you look at the corn market in Ohio,” he said.

“If we had $4 gas, people would be begging for this.”