A Vacation Surprise: Green Energy Grows in Indiana
REVISED: Fixed links, revised figures based on new information, added more links on ethanol and wind energy.
Tell nearly anyone that you are going to vacation on a farm in Indiana, and you’re likely to get a look. It’s roughly equal parts surprise and compassion with a dollop of snarky incredulity. It’s the same look one might imagine a child giving a confirmed enemy upon hearing of his diagnosis with something uncomfortable and a little unsavory, like scabies or mange.
The Indiana of popular imagination -- a holster-shaped sliver of corn fields, steel mills and basketball courts jammed in the middle of the Rust Belt -- is more a target of mockery than a tourism hot spot, but the pull of family is strong, so that’s where we went. What we found was a place for a delightful family getaway – affordable, friendly, lots to do. Perhaps just as surprisingly, it’s also home to a burgeoning movement to green energy sources that are being developed on much the same foundation as its agri-industrial past.
My family’s home place -– 500 acres of black, deep soil that the last glaciers scraped almost level some 12,000 years ago -- is planted entirely to corn.
Here, the land is almost perfectly suited for growing the native American grain. The deep soil, plentiful rainfall, and hot summers allow corn to serve as a massive solar collector, converting sunlight, water and nutrients into the most versatile plant product known. Corn also has the advantage of making and storing more energy than any other crop, on a per-acre basis.
Our operator (or tenant, in the local parlance, though he does not live on any of the many farms he rents) placed a huge bet this spring by planting corn on nearly all of his 4,000 acres. Each acre (about the size of a football field) will produce about 200 bushels of corn, a volume that would fill the average bedroom about thigh-deep.
He gambled that prices would remain relatively high this year (they have), and that he would be able to plant in a timely manner (he did, just barely, and only because of his new, state-of-the art equipment). He ‘doubled down’ on the presumption that he will be able harvest early enough (sometime in September) to deliver the corn on our farm to a nearby Cargill grain terminal. That terminal’s massive cylindrical bins, though five miles away, are visible from the farm and juxtapose, in an industrially elegant sense, with the smaller, sleeker tanks of the new plant next door, where much of the corn ends up as ethanol.
Ethanol. It’s a word perhaps as politically charged in 2008 as ‘Abu Ghraib’ was in 2004, reflecting and refracting one’s views, reducing them to cable news sound bites. One pundit’s ‘clean, green, renewable American fuel source’ is another’s ‘government-subsidized, net-negative energy boondoggle.’ Legislation first passed in the Clinton administration as a way to reduce air pollution by substituting ethanol for 10 percent of petroleum derivatives in areas prone to smog has been supplanted by a more ambitious Bush administration push for ethanol. As a result, production capacity has exploded in the last few years.
Walking the narrow lane that connects our two farm tracts is, in mid-summer, akin to walking a gantlet of nuns, resplendent in identical green tunics topped with chartreuse wimples. As we pass, the breeze gently rustles the stalks like a bit of gossip whispered mouth-to-ear.
Here, it’s easy to forget the controversy over ethanol. The facts certainly seem to support ethanol. Last year, our tenant produced 215 bushels per acre on this farm. Each of those bushels made about 2.8 gallons of ethanol, 15 pounds or so of distillers’ grain (DDG) – the protein and vitamin-rich byproduct that remains after alcohol is distilled from the starch -- and over a pound of corn oil. That means some 300,000 gallons of ethanol, over 700 tons of distillers’ grain, and 12,500 gallons of corn oil were grown here. Because Dan, our tenant, is one of the smartest, most innovative farmer/businessmen anywhere, he grew all this corn using less than 6 gallons of fuel per acre (or about 3,000 gallons total). Double that figure to account, generously, for the fuel used in producing his inputs – seed, fertilizer, a dab of herbicide – and the farm net energy gain is still a whopping 294,000 gallons – plus the considerable value of 100 tons of high-quality animal feed from the DDG by-product.
“Ah,” says the skeptic, “what about the energy required to produce the ethanol?” Fair question, and one whose answer, according to the United States Department of Agriculture, still leaves ethanol in the energy-positive column. In fact, ethanol is energy positive to the tune of 1.67 to 1. (For every BTU consumed in producing it, it returns 1.67). Further improvements in energy efficiency are coming every day. In fact, one study shows that ethanol production requires only one gallon of petroleum to produce 13 gallons of ethanol -- or two to three times more as previously estimated.
Ethanol plants used 21% less energy in 2006 than in 2001, while getting more ethanol from every bushel of grain. In many cases, they co-generate electricity from by-products. Water use is down. And, improvements in CO2 capture, DDG distribution, and other processes make ethanol a much better alternative than its detractors would have one believe.
However, scratch the surface of local farmers, and you’ll often find a ‘short-timer,’ a realist who knows that corn-based ethanol is a short-term, partial solution. “There is no one replacement for petroleum,” they’ll say. “No silver bullet.” What they will claim for ethanol is its usefulness as a bridge to whatever energy sources are ‘next': those that are also clean, renewable, accessible -- but more scalable than ethanol.
On our home farm, it’s hard to miss one of those sources: the wind. It never seems to stop. The glaciated terrain, with its gentle ridges that rise maybe 10 feet in elevation above the surrounding prairie, and the mid-continent clash of warm, humid southern air masses with their chillier northern cousins, makes for one breezy place. Add to the natural features the presence of big-time industrial infrastructure created by proximity to major manufacturing centers, and it’s no wonder that wind energy is a hot topic.
Just one county north, one of the largest wind farms in the country has sprung up like puffball mushrooms after a spring rain. These wind turbine structures, while puffball-white, are infinitely more permanent. Rising 230 feet from the fields, the towers and their three-bladed fans are alternately comforting, in their slowly revolving rhythm, and disturbing, in their alien-like presence. It’s like seeing a Star Wars storm trooper offering a plate of your grandmother’s home-baked cookies.
While there is some opposition to the potential placement of wind turbines on farms in our area, so far it seems muted. For every person who objects to the intrusion on the otherwise pastoral landscape, and mutters about noise (they make a low whooshing sound) or hazards to bats and birds, there seem to be three or four whose attitude is, ‘bring ‘em on.’
And, while the financial upside can be attractive (perhaps $28,000 per year, on a farm the size of ours), people I spoke to on our recent trip never even mentioned the money they could make. To them, already fortunate to live in a desirable vacation area like Indiana’s farm country, perhaps the reward of helping make the world a greener place is payment enough.
Audience:
Students and instructor, UNC JOMC 711
Abstract:
Indiana farms are at the forefront in the move to green energy sources, including ethanol and wind power.
Keywords:
Ethanol, Indiana, wind energy, green energy, wind turbine, corn, vacation, tourism
