Powering the harvest
Farmers aren't using fairy dust or unicorn farts here.
Awhile back and now lurking near the bottom of my “Substack o’ stuff” is my ode to country living, where in part I described living across from cornfields this year.
Over this past weekend it was exciting times in the Swartz household as those cornfields were harvested. In watching out the window or off my front porch at the dance of tractors and trucks being played out across the road, I thought about the amount of diesel fuel being used to power these vehicles, and it occurred to me: I bet the price of fuel to take all this corn out of the field is at least a couple-three hundred bucks more than it was last year.
But I’m not going to lie to you: I’m no expert on rows per gallon. What I can tell you is, over the spring and summer that we’ve watched these cornfields go from planting to harvest, the price of diesel around here flirted with 6 bucks a gallon before retreating to somewhere in the 4s now. Even with an operation of the scale of this farm (which probably has a pump of its own, drawng from a large tank of diesel available for all their implements and trucks that need it) it’s a sure bet their fuel wasn’t cheap.
And multiply that by all the fields this farming operation controls surrounding me - many are corn being harvested now, but there are a handful of soybean fields, too - and all of the melon busses that delivered hundreds of tons of watermelons to their processing plant down the road, and it’s easy to imagine this operation going through tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of fuel every month, including maybe a mid-five figure price premium they may not have bargained for when spring finally opened up after a snowy winter last year.
I’ll cheerfully admit that I’m not a farmer and I may be well overestimating the cost of fuel for the operation - but I’ll bet I’m not. When I know I drive my little car 10,000 miles a year and the extra buck fifty a gallon is taking $600 just out of my pocket annually, I could only imagine what a day’s worth of fuel for three tractor-trailers and two tractors doing their job for hours on end will run, and multiply that by the few weeks it will take to get the corn and soybeans in.
The mistake we have made as a nation is twofold. In the first part - and while I don’t think my local farmer has much of a role to play in this given the number of chicken farms around that could certainly use his bounty, I may be surprised - we have taken what is supposed to be food (with some varieties of it tasting really good boiled up on the cob and served with a little butter and pepper) and made it into a not-so-efficient fuel in the mistaken belief that we were going to run out of oil soon. It’s really weird that the point where we rediscovered our oil patch because of fracturing technology was also the point where we decided to artifically jack up corn prices by creating an ethanol market that we didn’t turn out to actually need. The only people who need it are politicians who want to pander to an early voting state.
The second and more egregious error is that of turning our back on what works well for us in terms of cheap, readily available energy in favor of trying to build a market (and there’s that government influence yet again!) in methods of energy extraction that are by definition unreliable and difficult to store and transport. (Not to mention the materials for many of its base components are only readily available from the hostile Chinese.) I haven’t seen a tractor run by solar panels or wind turbines yet, in part because they have enough equipment on them.
On that note, a couple months back a story began making the rounds about John Deere bringing out a line of electric tractors and forcing them on farmers. It seemed a little fishy to me, almost to the point of parody - but the best parody has a grain of truth to it. (Rush Limbaugh was a master at it for this reason.) Of course, John Deere denies the story but why wouldn’t they? We live in a nation where some regressive states are demanding the end of gasoline-powered cars by 2035, which is barely a dozen years hence. (If you think of how short a time it seems it’s been from the inauguration of Barack Obama and the rise of the TEA Party, well, that’s where we are now in relation to 2035.)
But you may not remember that era of the late-aughts was when we thought we were running out of oil, just at the dawn of the fracking boom. Some of us maintained the mantra, “drill, baby, drill” to bring down gas prices from a peak of $4 a gallon and guess what? We drilled, baby, drilled, and it eventually worked to lower oil prices. No one ever thought we would see gas prices beginning with “1” but, by gosh, for a brief spectacular moment we did because we were allowed to extract energy and make ourselves energy independent. Didn’t that feel good in an American pride sort of way?
I’m not promising gas prices back in the $1.75 a gallon range again because inflation screwed the pooch on that. But I believe that if we go back to allowing energy companies to do their thing and did away with these silly carveouts for “renewable” energy, we could bring back our standard of living rather quickly. While it may pinch farmers for a bit, let’s also bring an end to this ethanol misadventure. Some will grumble and groan, but their costs for fuel and feeding their families will also work their way down, too.
Maybe everyone should watch a farm for a couple hours. It sure has a way of making me think.