A CASH CROP FOR NEBRASKA FARMS
Despite drought and corn's high need for water, farmers still rely on the crop for their livelihood.
ART HOVEY
In April, the air in Nebraska's corn country fills with anticipation and the scent of moist soil, diesel smoke and weed-killing chemicals.
Farmers may temporarily shift their attention from worrisome debate about how to deal with dwindling water resources along the Platte River.
By mid-June, you will be able to hear irrigation pumps. In quieter moments, you could listen to the crackling sound of cornstalks growing as much as 2 inches per day.
"Literally, you can hear corn growing in its peak times of growth," said Roger Elmore, an agronomist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
But why do Nebraska farmers grow so much corn - more than three times as many bushels and more than 3 million more acres than in 1970?
Why do farmers try to water their way through a stubborn weather cycle that has lowered rivers, streams, reservoirs and groundwater levels and provoked a strong conservation response at the Legislature?
Until the weather turns wetter, why not plant wheat or grain sorghum or other crops that don't depend on irrigation?
There are many reasons, most of them tied to economics:
- Because, on any given day, the state's beef sector is feeding corn to almost a million more cattle than it was 25 years ago.
- Because the state's corn-based ethanol industry has gone from virtually no corn consumption in 1990 to a 25 percent share of what is now a billion-bushel annual crop.
- Because the federal farm program keeps putting tax dollars in the pockets of farmers who plant millions of acres of corn in arrow-straight, half-mile-long rows.
- Because corn's yield potential keeps rising, and its acreage is riding the crest of center-pivot irrigation development that dates to the 1970s.
And because farmers put the experience, enthusiasm and energy of generations into the task.
The years 1974 and 1975 were "a big deal, you would say then," said George Engle, an 83-year-old Fillmore County farmer. "That's when pivot irrigation came in, when they started plowing up the alfalfa, breaking up the prairies, things like that."
Nebraska had 18.9 million acres of cropground under cultivation in 2002, according to the Nebraska Agricultural Statistics Service - about 2.7 million more than in 1969.
Engle is part of a four-generation farming family that still tends to alfalfa, pasture and a cow herd 65 miles southwest of Lincoln. Does he sense time is running out on such a heavy emphasis on irrigation?
"Well, water is a concern of mine," he replied, "but I don't know. I'm not worried about running out. I think, before that happens, we would have some very rigid regulation on it."
Some would argue the time already has arrived. LB962, enacted by the 2004 Legislature, gives the state the authority to stop the drilling of new wells when the demand for water meets or exceeds the supply of surface water and groundwater.
The state Department of Natural Resources already has acted on that authority in 11 heavily irrigated areas in central and western parts of the state. At the end of 2005, water users in much of the state - including farmers and cities - anticipated that the DNR would expand its restrictions. In 2006, the Legislature continued to grapple with water issues.
Notably, the department halted drilling of new irrigation wells in most of the Platte River valley, from Columbus west, including the North and South Platte valleys. More than 28,500 irrigation wells already exist in this prime growing region.
Meanwhile, the Central Nebraska Public Power and Irrigation District awaited an answer from the Nebraska Supreme Court on its bid to save what is left of Lake McConaughy from drought and heavy pumping. District managers want groundwater wells regulated upstream along the North Platte because of their influence on surface flows.
Is all of this enough to alter Nebraska's corn-growing ways?
Time will tell.
Milford farmer Rob Heyen looks past rising corn consumption when he is asked why the crop and its almost insatiable thirst remain so dominant in a drought.
He looks toward seed-corn companies that keep outdoing themselves year after year and outdoing the yield progress of soybeans, wheat and other crops on a bushel-per-acre basis.
"We have had 220 to 250 irrigated-corn yields on pivots the last two or three years," Heyen said, "which was unheard of five years ago."
Under those circumstances, he said, "technology has allowed us to make such huge yield gains that it just encourages us to produce beyond the poor economics of too much corn."
As executive director of the Nebraska Corn Board, Lincoln's Don Hutchens is proud of research and promotion that keep national and international demand for corn in the race with supply.
"If somebody would have told us in 1993, when we had 6.3 billion bushels of production, that in 2004 we would be using nearly 11 billion bushels of corn, we would have thought they were smoking something crazy," Hutchens said of the national demand. "But we're on the brink of using 11 billion bushels of corn."
Steve Sorum of the Nebraska Ethanol Board also can point to recent success in boosting the state's ethanol production.
From 1985 through 2004, the plant capacity of the state's ethanol plants grew from 8.5 million gallons to 473 million gallons and climbing.
In producing 2.5 gallons of ethanol per bushel of corn, ethanol production has risen almost in lock step with the recent rise in the state's corn production to more than 1 billion bushels per year.
Sorum also points out several reasons for optimism for ethanol and its corn component in the years ahead. They include U.S. Department of Agriculture analysis that found a net energy gain as corn is converted to fuel, as well as prospects for a federal, renewable-fuels mandate.
Also, rising petroleum prices are starting to make ethanol blends competitive at the wholesale and retail levels.
"For the first time in history," Sorum said, "the wholesale price of ethanol has fallen below that of gasoline."
Twelve plants are now operating in Nebraska; six are under construction. About 15 more are planned.
Ethanol progress, of course, has not been free, or even necessarily cheap.
Since 1990, corn and grain-sorghum producers have joined with taxpayers to spend about $190 million to pay for tax credits offered to state ethanol plants. There are also federal tax incentives.
Roger Selley, a University of Nebraska agricultural economist at the South Central Research Extension Center at Clay Center, said there are several reasons why ethanol's main ingredient, corn, still makes economic sense in the Cornhusker state.
"It really does get back to a point where the corn plant is a very efficient plant and crop to grow," Selley said. "We have a large market. We have a lot of experience with growing corn. There's a lot of research money put into corn to continue to improve on it."
Despite these factors, corn's popularity as a crop is influenced only partially by the price farmers are paid for it. According to the Nebraska Agricultural Statistics Service, the unpredictable market price of corn has ranged from a low of $1.52 to a high of $4.62 per bushel over the past 10 years.
Selley acknowledged the financial benefits in the federal farm program also influence how much corn farmers will plant in the spring.
Some shrewder farmers have figured out how to lock in high market prices in the spring in the private sector and still take advantage of the government safety net and loan-deficiency payments that typically go with lower prices in the fall.
"You don't brag about this at the coffee shop," Selley said, "but in the position you're in, at harvest time, you're really hoping the price goes down."
Suggestions from farm-policy critics that farmers grow corn in part to earn government income are not new. Those criticisms go back a lot further than a 2002 farm bill that actually reduced federal benefits for growing corn.
Direct government payments to Nebraska corn farmers still amounted to about $240.4 million in 2004, the latest figure available from the state office of the federal Farm Service Agency in Lincoln.
"I'm sure it impacts a lot of people's decisions," said Dan Steinkruger, a program specialist at the state office for the past 13 years.
Seward farmer Jon Propst does not quarrel with that assessment, "even though you don't pull in as much money as you used to."
Even with the smaller safety net put in place in 2002, "usually corn pays more from the government than what soybeans do," Propst said.
The latest updates in the federal corn program offered farmers a three-legged stool to ride out the drought and the effects of international competition on the market.
The stool is supported by direct payments of 28 cents per bushel, counter-cyclical payments that kick in when cash prices fall below a federal target price of $2.63 per bushel and loan-deficiency payments that fill the gap when cash prices fall below a federal corn loan-rate that is adjusted by county.
It is important for critics to know farmers are not given government money for every bushel.
For example, an irrigating farmer capable of producing more than 200 bushels per acre might be eligible to collect counter-cyclical payments on only about 130 to 140 bushels, Selley said.
Furthermore, farmers who keep planting corn never know how the next multiyear farm bill will be structured. They do know previous bills have taken the production history of individual farms into account in determining benefits.
"It's still in the back of farmers' minds that continuing payments at somewhere close to their current level may depend on his continuing to grow corn," Selley said. If the government takes another look at individual production histories, "they would have that history maintained."
George Engle - progeny of a German immigrant farmer, grandson of Henry, son of Alex, father of George Jr. - remembers the non-irrigated crops that fell by the wayside in Fillmore County as irrigation took hold.
Wheat. Oats. Grain sorghum. Alfalfa.
"They got all the fences out, especially around the Geneva area. You won't see any livestock in pens whatsoever," he said.
He remembers a conversation many years ago with a neighbor as he and others grasped the significance of their ability to supplement rainfall with what once seemed ample water from below ground.
"I can't raise wheat anymore," the neighbor told Engle. "My farm's too good for it. I've got to raise corn."
