O beautiful for spacious skies,
For emerald waves of grain

By Mary Timmins

At the heart of the Urbana campus lies the soul of the University of Illinois, a small parcel of earth first tilled in 1876, when UI researchers set out to establish whether fertilizer is important to plants.

The oldest continuously cultivated experimental agricultural ground in the U.S., the Morrow Plots has flowered over the years with plants born to a land-grant mission and marshaled in various rotations – oats, alfalfa, clover, soybeans and the aristocrat of them all, corn. Now, as for the past 131 years, the cornstalks in the Morrow Plots line up in neat rows, like slope-shouldered scholars poised to march into a convocation celebrating their importance to the work of the University and the life of humankind.

Ways with corn have long been the work of scientists at the U of I, and the grain’s mega-success is now driving research not only on how to use it better but how to move beyond it. Whether fuels can be economically and sustainably derived from agricultural products outside the food chain is the question, the answer to which still lies beyond the horizon of the experimental crops along the south margin of the Urbana campus.

“The reality,” according to Robert Easter, PHD ’76 ACES, dean of the UI College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences, “is that the world is looking to agriculture to provide not only food but fuel.”

And in this world, at this time, corn rules.

Betting the farm
Kent Krukewitt ’73 ACES grows corn on the same farm outside Homer worked by his father and grandfather, where yields have increased beyond the 50 bushels typical in his grandfather’s time to the 180 bushels per acre that Krukewitt expects to harvest this year. Thanks to technology developed and disseminated through land-grant institutions such as the U of I and agricultural companies, the stalks in Krukewitt’s fields, bred to thrive in minimal space and maximal area, crowd together like teens at a rock concert. “Technology has changed every aspect of farming,” he said. At the close of this growing season, more than 12 billion bushels – enough to fill the Sears Tower 127 times or so – will trundle forth from lands throughout the Corn Belt to destiny as food, feed and fuel.

Yet phenomenal yields are running behind even more phenomenal demand. “In 2006, 1.6 billion bushels of corn went for ethanol,” explained Darrel Good, a UI professor of agricultural and consumer economics, who’s good at helping farmers grow large crops and make them pay. “This year, it will be 2.1 billion or more. The USDA forecast is for 3.4 billion in 2008.” Drawn by projected yields of $328 per acre for corn – as opposed to $249 per acre for soybeans – many farmers, including Krukewitt, are backing off standard crop rotations to grow corn in at least some of the fields where they’d usually plant soybeans. While profitable in the short run – a decrease in soybeans is expected to boost the price on that commodity in the bargain – growing corn after corn can, over time, lower yields, encourage pests and add to water pollution.

A vast, cunningly laid obstacle course lurks below the seemingly simple task of working the land. The snazzy technology that makes life easier – such as satellite readouts showing field fertilizer levels and yields and 400-horsepower tractors – also renders the credit balance smaller. Inputs essential to large-scale farming, such as nitrogen fertilizer and anhydrous ammonia, have heaved in price consonant with the corn. And don’t even talk about rents. Many farmers lease some or all of the land they work, and many face boosts by landlords hungry for a larger share of the corn pie.

“Farming is a huge gamble,” Krukewitt said. “It boils down to managing risk.”

The worst problems can’t even be managed – such as the drought that threatened the 2007 harvest early this summer. When the heat broke in July and the rains came, the Midwest blew out a collective “whew!” as thirsty young corn plants drank and started moving skyward at a rate of as much as 4 inches a day. At press time, the U.S. Department of Agriculture predicts the largest corn harvest in history. However, “if it decides not to rain some year,” said Nafziger, “we’ve got a big problem.”

Pushing corn “big time”
Over the past two years, the price of corn has risen by about a third – last winter, speculation drove futures to an extraordinary $4.60 a bushel. Neal Kottke ’62 BUS, founder and chairman of the Chicago trading firm Kottke Associates, explained that the doubling of the price of crude oil over the past two to three years has contributed to the rise of long-term agricultural commodity prices because of the energy costs involved in production and transportation. Corn is especially spiky pricewise because corn offers an alternative to oil. (So do soybeans, in the form of biodiesel, an alternative fuel popular on the diesel-engine-intensive roads of Europe.) Yet fluctuations are the way of the commodities world, and that world goes on. As one who has seen many up-and-down markets many times before, Kottke observed, “It’s business as usual – only at a higher level.”

Which is not to say that business as usual doesn’t have unusual – and sometimes unacceptable – costs. High corn prices are putting pressure on the U.S. government conservation reserve program, which pays farmers to take acreage out of production. With profits from corn that could be grown on that land outstripping subsidies, farmers may begin putting such acreage back into production. Many of the 35 million acres in the conservation reserve program are there, though, not just to prop up the commodity economy but because they are environmentally sensitive areas, such as wetlands. Corn needs a lot of nitrogen fertilizer, which environmentalists link to water pollution. Moreover, ethanol plants drink heroic amounts of H2O – three or more gallons for every gallon of fuel produced. Meanwhile, as the government props up both ethanol and corn, subsidies are unavailable for most fruits and vegetables, even though they’re essential for diversity in the human diet. Heating this debate are questions about the link between high-fructose corn syrup – used in soda and processed foods – and obesity. Such is the cost of corn. So too is the sheer amount of acreage – a resource that is, when all is said and done, limited – being pushed out of food production and into biofuels.

For professor Good, “Ethanol is profitable enough that it could get corn away from everything else” in a time of shortage, sending the livestock and dairy operations, food processing companies and exporters that also buy corn into the lurch. In such a scenario, said Good, the government might even have to step in, allocating corn based on need rather than demand. “We’ve pushed corn big time, and we’re still building ethanol plants,” he observed. “Most people recognize there’s a limit. It takes a lot of acres – there’s no question about it.”

High on corn liquor
Corn kernels make good fuel because of high concentrations of sugar and starch. (So do beets and sugar cane, used to make ethanol in China and Brazil, respectively.) When ground, mashed and inoculated with yeast, corn handily distills itself into alcohol (ethanol, also variously known as corn liquor, moonshine and white lightning), which both adults and cars can gulp, though to noticeably different effect. The leftovers, known as distiller’s grain, can be fed to swine and cattle, though chickens don’t go for it.

From the stills of mountain bootleggers, ethanol has made its way into the gas tanks of the nation, pushed on first by the need to use up surplus corn and then by emissions regulations that took effect in the ’70s. Along the way, corn has fattened on substantial government subsidies, both for growers and ethanol manufacturers, and has rewarded the nation with a substantial surplus. Until fairly recently, as Good explained, ethanol was just another way to burn up the country’s extra corn, “an oxygenate for automotive fuels” that burns cleaner than the gasoline to which it was added, helping automobiles meet increasingly stringent emissions standards.

Given today’s hard times at pumpside, with gasoline sticker shock lapping toward $3.50 per gallon, ethanol has taken a hard right off the county road of surplus usage and headed up the paved road of big money. Meanwhile, thanks to state marketing boards throughout the Midwest, corn has also twined itself into the backbone of the American chain of food and products, manifest in uses ranging from livestock feed, breakfast cereal and soda to biodegradable lawn bags, tires and golf tees.

Chewing up cellulose
All such derive from corn kernels. The economic value of the rest of the corn plant – stalk, leaves, and tassels, collectively known as stover – is, for now, minimal. Mostly such leftovers get plowed back into the earth as a source of nutrition for future crops. But a major push is on to create genetically engineered organisms (“superbugs” as one UI researcher irreverently terms them) that can chew up high-cellulose material, including perennial grasses like switchgrass and Miscanthus as well as corn stover, and release sugars and starches for fermentation.

Thus corn is the big daddy for a second generation of biofuels. Cellulosic technology for heating pellets is fairly advanced; automotive fuels await automobiles further down the road. “These plants have had millions of years to make themselves recalcitrant,” pointed out Hans Blaschek, who leads the new Center for Advanced BioEnergy Research at Illinois. Blaschek’s specialty is corn-based bio-butanol, an efficient, though costly, ethanol alternative. He had been studying the compound for a quarter of a century, more or less unnoticed until last year, when DuPont and British Petroleum announced a partnership to develop and manufacture biofuels. “That’s when my phone lit up and wouldn’t stop ringing,” Blaschek said.

Stephen Long, a UI plant biologist who’s investigating the potential of high-energy cellulosic perennials, particularly Miscanthus, got an even bigger boost for his work in February, when BP awarded $500 million for a 10-year biofuels research collaboration among Illinois, the University of California-Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory – an endeavor that Long leads on the Urbana campus.

Long and Blaschek also collaborate with one another, working under the auspices of the Institute for Genomic Biology, a new interdisciplinary, multi-themed research center at the U of I. It is a charming fact of campus geography that the IGB opened this spring right next to the Morrow Plots, although the association is largely romantic. The real business of crop study at the University has moved on to much larger tracts south of campus where frowsy switchgrass and Dr. Seuss-style Miscanthus plumes creep toward deep-green shag carpets of soybeans and corn’s prim, crowded geometry.

Biofuels and the future
Promising as renewable energy may be, a scrim of questions hangs over the burgeoning field of biofuels. How stable are genetically engineered organisms? How might the changeover to radical new fuel sources be effected? Will there be enough land? Will there be enough water? Can farmers, processors and the public adapt? What are the implications for transportation and processing? Encouragingly for this last concern, Good said that ethanol plants can probably be retrofitted with relative ease to process cellulosic fuels when and if that technology becomes practically and economically feasible.

Though growing fuel along with food may not be so steady or self-sufficient a proposition as it appears initially, Dean Easter of ACES remains confident. “It’s not food versus fuel,” he said. “It’s food and fuel.” Given advances in agricultural technology made through research at institutions such as Illinois, this is a harmony, Easter said, “that’s clearly possible.” What the coming of biofuels may herald, though, is an era in which corn’s monarchy gives way to a more diverse and collaborative plant regime.

Meanwhile, for the here and now, corn is king.