Siphoning Off Corn to Fuel Our Cars

'Maxed Out'

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The Corn Debate

Across the country, ethanol plants are swallowing up more and more of the nation's corn crop, linking food and fuel prices just as oil is rising to new records.

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Back in Charles City, farmer Johnson is reaping the benefits of high corn prices. He knows what the other extreme is like. His grandparents arrived from Germany in 1913 and, dirt poor, worked as farmhands before buying this land. Johnson took it over in the early 1970s, when prices, which hadn't changed much since the end of World War II, doubled and then leveled off again for most of the next three decades.

Two hundred years ago, he says, this was prairie covered with six-foot-high switchgrass. Winnebago Indians lived here, and then white settlers came in the mid-1800s.

But now the ethanol plant and 50 wind turbines that were erected over the winter have brought new energy to a town that Johnson says long lived off "the ground God created with glaciers and laid down here."

VeraSun built its plant in this area to be close to corn farms; Johnson says that he keeps part of the money that once went to trucking his corn to the barge company. "That money stays in my pocket now, and I like that."

Johnson is a one-person summary of how high corn prices are washing through the world of agriculture and climate change. Normally, he plants half of his 900 acres with corn and half with soybeans. He alternates crops on each field because it is better for the soil.

But last year he planted 500 acres of corn and 400 of soybeans, and this year he will do the same. "The market was screaming, 'Farmer Johnson, plant more corn, plant more corn,' " Johnson says.

Farmers across the country joined him. In 2007, U.S. acreage devoted to corn hit a record 93.6 million acres, up 20 percent from the year before. Farmers are expected to plant a little less than that this year.

That market response would ordinarily bring nothing but cheers, but the growing alarm about climate change casts it in a different light. In the United States last year, corn edged out some soybeans, which as a result are being grown in greater numbers on previously unplowed areas in other countries. And that releases carbon dioxide that had previously been stored in the soil as organic matter.

Johnson, along with about two dozen other people in the area, has invested in 25,000 acres of cattle-ranching and savanna land in Roraima state in northern Brazil, where they have planted 750 acres of soybeans and plan to expand. He says U.S. agriculture is a mature market. "We're maxed out," he says.

Meanwhile in Iowa, he is tilling his own soil more often, a farming trend that dismays climate experts. Usually Johnson doesn't till his soil in the fall; he points to short remnants of cornstalks that still stand in rows where soybeans will be inserted. But Johnson plans to till a piece of land where he will plant corn for a second year in a row.

Johnson also owns a small piece of land that is part of the federal government's conservation reserve program, which pays farmers for leaving land vacant. Millions of acres are in the program. The CRP parcels tend to have lower-quality soil, and they attract birds and other wildlife. In the climate-conscious era, they have the added virtue of storing carbon in the soil.

Johnson put a 10-acre parcel aside years ago and signed a 10-year contract with the government to leave it undisturbed. But the contract is running out, and he's thinking about planting corn. The CRP contract pays him $170 an acre. Johnson says, "I'm making a lot more than that now."