Archives

Visitor Counter

321866
Visit Today : 48
Visit Yesterday : 30
This Month : 879
This Year : 9169
Total Visit : 321866
Hits Today : 87
Total Hits : 1064216
Who's Online : 2
Your IP Address: 44.197.113.64
Server Time: 24-03-19

Drought’s Reverb…. Valley Growers Urged To Plant Sorghum For Biofuel

first published in Fresno Business Journal

The South Valley’s only ethanol production plant is encouraging local farmers to plant grain sorghum next Spring promising to buy the grain to make ethanol instead of using Midwest corn.

“We would love to buy all the sorghum they can produce” says Lyle Schlyer,president of Calgren Renewable Fuels near Pixley in Tulare County.

Currently,the 55mm gallon ethanol plant depends almost 100% on train loads of corn shipped from the Midwest to make the biofuel.”We could all benefit“ explains Schlyer – with the sky-high price of corn due to the record Midwest drought this summer, putting the hurt on the livestock industry, raising food prices and making for negative margins at most ethanol plants.

Meanwhile,ethanol makers are taking heat for high corn prices,blamed by dairymen and the livestock industry – now pressuring Washington to roll back renewable fuel requirements. Ironically, those fuel requirements were put in place to reduce carbon emissions that cause global warming,implicated in more extreme weather events like the drought.

Calgren has teamed up with the J.D. Heiskell grain company of Tulare and seed company Bill B. Vanola Grain & Seed of Stratford. Sales manager with Vanola, Jeff Chedester says 20 years ago there were  tens of thousands of acres of sorghum grown in the Valley but farmers converted mostly to corn.Today, Chedester estimates we grow only about 5000 acres of grain sorghum.

Crop Could Grow To 25,000 Acres

With a strong local buyer in the ethanol plant and the costs and water savings seen in planting sorghum vs corn “I don’t see any reason why we could not grow that crop to 25,000 acres plus“ argues Chedester who for the past month has talked up the idea with area growers with some success.

Chedester – as a result of discussions earlier this year – some 1100 new acres of the crop were planted by several local growers and later this fall that sorghum will be run through the Calgren plant with the theory being that no significant modifications will be needed in the facility to make ethanol.

“We’re pretty exited about it” states Schlyer adding that “we will do a test run through the plant this year” to make sure it processes as expected, likely from Chedester’s growers local crop. ”Our target would be to offset about 20% of the 20 million bushels of corn we need to bring in.If we did a lot more – we would have to figure out how to store it but we are not putting a cap on it.”

Sorghum is used to make biofuel in some states with a larger crop.Forty-three percent of the sorghum produced in Kansas and 23 percent of the sorghum produced in Texas is used to make ethanol says one industry source.

Chedester says benefits of producing sorghum include the fact that the grain will grow in high PH – salty soil,use one third the water that corn requires,uses half the fertilizer and the seed costs about 20% of the current seed price for corn.

On the production side, farmers will get around 3 tons per acre for sorghum vs 5 tons per acre for corn but with the lower input costs and lower water use, this really does pencil out.”

Josh Dejung of J.D. Heiskell says like with grain corn – the processing of sorghum at the ethanol plant puts out a distiller’s grain feed byproduct fed to cows,nutritious and cheaper than corn distiller’s grain that is an important part of ethanol plants’ margins. Dejung says he has been spending more time in Kern county talking to farmers now that his company has a grain facility near Bakersfield after they bought an old cotton gin.

Pixley is ideally located to take in grain from Kern,Kings and Tulare counties within a 20 to 30 mile radius.

Schlyer says buying local helps save transportation costs for everyone since all California ethanol makers must pay to bring most of the feedstock in 100 car trainloads from the Midwest. Pacific Ethanol’s Paul Koehler says their company’s Stockton plant now uses about 11% locally grown corn,however. Lowering the transportation distance also makes the fuel produced more green as new state rules are phased in.

Using grain sorghum instead of corn should ease concerns of the California livestock and dairy industry,Calgren’s neighbors,who complain that using corn to to make biofuel drives up the price of rolled corn they use to feed cattle.”This should help lower the price of corn” explains Chedester who is part of a larger nationwide effort to increase sorghum planting for renewable uses.

Chedester says to increase the certainty this will happen,his firm will contract with growers sometimes even before the crop is planted.

While California farmers have had a tight water year,it is not nearly as bad as the Midwest where they do not irrigate – depending on summer rain for their crop. Watching the impending drought in the Midwest developing earlier this summer, California farmers raced to plant a late corn crop say sources, looking to reap the harvest late this fall.

That’s just one of the reverberations from the Drought of 2012 that has engulfed half the country. Besides the impact on ethanol makers, the Valley’s dairies are reliving the tough times they saw in 2009 unable to even cover the cost of feed they say, and more will likely close their barn doors.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *