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Ethanol Pushers

Part 2: Despite its hype as a green fuel, corn-based ethanol is dirty business from the farm all the way to the exhaust pipe.

By Carolyn Szczepanski 

Last week, the Pitch visited Garnett, Kansas, a town where residents had chipped in to build a $46 million plant that cooks corn into ethanol. They believed that the plant would provide jobs that would keep Garnett's young people from moving away, that it would promote business and provide farmers with financial stability. But Garnett has seen little benefit from the plant. Corn prices are still low, the plant has produced few jobs and shops in the town square still sit empty.

A gray sky hangs over a soybean field framed by the weathered metal of empty storage bins. A humid breeze threatens more unwanted August rain that could stall the harvest after a too-hot, too-dry growing season. Some of the corn crop is down after last night's storm.

But Gene Millard is smiling.

"This goes back a ways," he says, surveying his farm.

In 1905, Millard's grandparents bought the first acres of this land near tiny Osborn, Missouri. Now a grandfather himself, Millard grew up here in a house that got so cold in the winter, he could scrape frost off the walls.

"Right where these beans are, that was a military training field," he says. "When I was a little kid, I'd watch these B-51s land right back here until the Second World War was over and the land went back to the farm. But there was a house here and a barn and all that. So this has some emotional attachment."

Millard had begun a broadcasting career on rural AM radio stations when he took over the land in 1966 as a third-generation farmer. His 1,200-acre operation has been passed down through the same family for more than 100 years. Millard has reason to be proud of his family's accomplishment, because it's rarely been easy.

The farm started as a livestock operation, but the family didn't have enough money to stay in the hog business when the industry started moving to high-volume corporate farms in the late 1970s.

Then the farm crisis of the 1980s hit, and the rural economy collapsed.

"People were losing their farms, losing their homes, losing their self-respect," Millard says. "It was just a pandemic of travesty, disasters. Land values deflated, everything of asset value deflated."

The worst of the crisis passed, but prices for Millard's crops continued to decline. In the mid-'90s, while he managed two radio stations to supplement his income, Millard started working with other farmers to find a way to make their land profitable.

"We were on what I call the bleeding edge," he says. "The proposal was that we, as producers, have to start taking some strong initiatives to invest in a future if we're going to stay on our farms."

On this late summer afternoon, Millard looks like a man who isn't going anywhere. When Millard's son Brian came home complaining about his teaching job, Millard was able to hire him as a business partner, paying Brian the same salary he had made in a classroom. In 2006, Millard says, they'll enjoy more return from their corn than he's seen in years.

The reason: a new brand of moonshine that has Americans drunk with optimism about the country's energy future.

Millard is the chairman of Missouri's first ethanol production plant. Golden Triangle Energy is a modest complex in Craig, Missouri, that turns bushels of corn into gallons of vehicle fuel. He wears a black ball cap emblazoned with Golden Triangle's icon.

Guys like Millard joined hundreds of federal bureaucrats, smartly dressed businessmen and jeans-wearing farmers at the American Coalition for Ethanol conference at the Hyatt Regency Crown Center last month. There, they heard Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, Missouri Gov. Matt Blunt and scores of energy experts herald a new fuel economy that will bring prosperity to rural America and break the country's dangerous and dirty addiction to foreign oil.

In one speech, Jason Grumet, director of the National Commission on Energy Policy, made a stunning proclamation about ethanol.

"This is truly about the possibility of changing the world, about ensuring the homeland here, improving our economy, eliminating global poverty and actually challenging the petroleum oligarchs so that we can spread this global freedom and democracy around the world," he said.

It's been a good year for ethanol, starting with George W. Bush's State of the Union speech, in which the president lamented America's dependence on foreign oil and proposed ethanol as a way to "change how we power our automobiles." State and federal mandates already in place ensure that ethanol-gasoline blends increased their presence at gas pumps across the country.

Riding the dirt roads that crisscross Millard's farm, it's easy to believe that fuel distilled from corn still shimmering with last night's rain might really help lower gas prices, clean the environment and end our self-destructive reliance on the Middle East.

Too bad it isn't true. lambering back into his pickup after dumping two inches of water out of his rain gauge, Millard distills in one sentence what his 400 acres of corn mean to the rest of America.

"We deliver enough corn for a gazillion bags of Cheetos," he says, half-joking.

There's just one problem: Though his crop sustains countless snack-happy Americans (and farmers like him feed millions of cows), it can't deliver enough profit to feed his family.

In recent years, the price for finished corn products — soft drinks, chips and breakfast cereals — has gone up. But the price for corn itself has gone down. Millard remembers that in 1972, he was getting $3 a bushel. The price slid closer to $2 in the 1980s. Recently, he says, it dipped as low as "$1.70-something."

He needs $3 a bushel. "So if the market will only give us two," he says, "we've got to have a dollar someplace else."

That's where the rest of us start picking up the tab.

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