Driving along New Hampshire's roads, you see fields of corn. You might be tempted to think some local farmers are cashing in on the national rise in corn prices. NHPR's Jon Greenberg found out that we would do well to avoid that temptation.
It makes all the sense in the world. The price of field corn has tripled thanks to government subsidies for ethanol and rising oil prices. New Hampshire farmers grow corn, ergo, a little bit of that corn craze manna ought to be raining down in this state. How useful is that logic?
CUT: Not much
Richard Uncles is with the state's department of Agriculture and he's being polite. He could have said, Not at all. We just don't grow that kind of corn. What you see along the road are fields of corn silage
CUT: which is a product that dairy farmers produce to feed their dairy cattle throughout the year.
With silage, you take the entire plant, stalk, leaves, ears and all, chop it up and store it in an air tight space. Natural acids in the corn come out and preserve it through a kind of pickling process. Uncles says the dairy cows like it. Local farmers also grow a much smaller amount of sweet corn which is fine for eating but not for fuel.
New Hampshire farmers could grow corn for ethanol but they don't have the monster combines that are used in the mid-west for harvesting. These machines grab each ear, pull off the kernals, separate out the chaff,
CUT: And they do it at the rate of tens of bushels per minute. They'll do 8, 10, 12, 16 rows wide.
But Uncles says, even if local farmers harvested corn as efficiently as their counterparts to the west and got the federal subsidies that come with that kind of corn, it still wouldn't pay. The return is about 900 dollars an acre. Uncles says New Hampshire farmers can do much better.
CUT: Vegetable farms, small fruits blueberries, strawberries, raspberries, apples. Those kind of returns can be several thousand dollars per acre.
So when you see that corn growing in the Connecticut Valley or along the Merrimack or Contoocook, don't think of ethanol. Think milk.
For NHPR News, I'm Jon Greenberg
