Three years ago, an aerial view of Carroll County, Mo., looked more like a lake. The Missouri River flood of 2019 robbed area farmers of crops and vital infrastructure.
“We had six to seven foot of water where we’re standing right now,” says Carroll County farmer Adam Casner. “It’s been quite a rebuilding process – actually still involved in it.”
The flood changed the landscape forever, as Casner’s family relocated their family home that had been planted in the river bottoms for decades. Farther from the river, and on higher ground, they also built a new shop to house equipment.
Crops Off to a Strong Start
The Casners aren’t finished fixing the damage left behind, but the loss of crops is something the young farmers won’t ever forget, even if they’ve come a long way in the three years since.
“We’ve got a very good-looking prospect of crop here,” says Casner while looking out at this year’s corn crop. “We had really good stands, emergence was good. We had some timely rains early.”
Casner says the ground they farm along the Missouri River missed some of the recent rains that traveled across Missouri. While concerned about dryness, he’s thankful for the crop he has.
Planting started about a month behind this year for Casner, but with strong stands and minimal replant in his fields that are a few miles from the Missouri River, the crop is off to a solid start.
The Truth About Field Corn
The lush fields look promising, even if these fields are also ones that can be tangled in misconceptions from those driving by on Highway 65 that runs adjacent to their original home farm.
“A small fraction of the field corn we grow goes to actual food products such as cornflakes or sweeteners or such,” explains Casner. “It’s actually less than 10% that goes towards those products.”
Casner says the majority of the field corn rooted in his fields and other farms across the U.S. goes to other products outside of food.
“When you drive down the highway and see the field corn out here, 90% of that goes to the ethanol, exports and livestock,” he adds.
USDA’s June acreage report showed U.S. farmers planted 89.9 million acres of corn this year, and one out of every four bushels of added corn demand in the U.S. comes from cattle and hog producers.
Read more: Cattle and Corn: How They Work as One Team in Iowa and Nebraska
Livestock, Ethanol and Exports
While some farms may not know exactly where the corn they grow goes after its taken to the local grain elevator, all of Casner’s corn is sent to two local ethanol plants.
“Where we’re standing now, we can hit U.S. Highway 65 and go 10 miles north or south and hit an ethanol plant,” says Casner. “So, that’s where 100% of our grain produced goes.”
One of those local ethanol plants is Mid-Missouri Energy (MME), a farmer-owned ethanol plant that took root 17 years ago.
“By design, our facility has about 10 days of ethanol storage and 10 days of DDG storage behind us here,” says Chris Wilson, the general manager of MME.
Processing 55,000 Bushels of Corn/Day
Today, the rural Missouri plant is in constant motion with an average of 100 trucks entering and exiting the facility each day. In total, MME processes around 55,000 bushels of corn a day.
“One of the nice things about our facility is we can speed up to 60,000 bushels a day or we can slow down if margins dictate to 30,000 or 40,000 bushels per day,” says Wilson.
Out of the 55,000 bushels of corn processed on average, the plant produces:
- 160,000 gallons of ethanol
- 415 tons of dried distillers grains (DDGs)
- 45,000 pounds of corn oil
- 450 tons of CO2
After local farms unload the corn from their trucks, it’s then processed into ethanol, DDGs and corn oil. The facility stores the product on site before shipped out to end users across the U.S.
“Most of our DDG products ship to the south, so southern Missouri, northern Arkansas, Oklahoma, southeastern Kansas,” says Wilson.
Providing Livestock Feed
By being located farther south in the Corn Belt, MME has prime placement for end users farther south, especially Arkansas’ poultry industry. The majority of their grain travels a couple hundred miles to feed the livestock industry there, but a portion of the DDGs stays local and is used by livestock producers like Brent Sandidge, a pork producer in Saline County, Mo.
“We use DDGs a lot in our gestation rations,” says Sandidge of Ham Hill Farms. “We use it in late nursery quite a bit and then all the way through finishing to the last few diets.”
Sandidge’s operations are located just 16.8 miles from MME, and today, Ham Hill Farms is still a family farm – one that’s been in business for more than a century.
“It’s kind of neat to be able to say you’ve been here that long and are still producing food for people,” he says.
Read more: No, Grass-Finished Beef Isn’t Healthier or Better for the Environment
Sandidge grows almost all of their own feed, processing it and storing it in their feed mill.
“Built this feed mill in 1962, the original mill behind us was to feed out 2,600 head a year, and now it’s feeding out over 60,000, and sometimes over 70,000, hogs a year,” he says.
The locally produced feed source is one Sandidge developed a taste for when the ethanol plant first opened in the mid-2000s.
“It reduces the cost of our diet, you get fiber, and there’s nutritional benefits with protein,” he explains. “It just fits into the diet really, really well.”
The fiber and protein are both attractive qualities, but the Missouri pork producer says it’s also the convenience of the DDGs.
“We can run up there and pick up a load and have it here in an hour,” he says.
Battling PRRS
Sandidge continues to find ways to become even more efficient as a pork producer, but this past year has been riddled with challenges.
“PRRS (porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome) virus has been a huge problem for us for a number of years. We get healthy and then we have a break again. And we’re dealing with the 1-4-4 L1c variant right now,” says Sandidge.
The most recent variant is not only aggressive and hard to control, but costly. PRRS has been a disease pork producers continue to battle, and it’s been devastating to hog operations across the U.S.
“We had a couple months where we didn’t wean very many pigs, so our sales were basically nothing,” says Sandidge.
The situation is finally improving on his Saline County farms, but he says it’s taken nearly a year to recover.
“We sell about eight loads a week, and we’re just about back to where we’re doing that pretty consistently now,” he adds.
The Inflation Factor
As Sandidge rebuilds, he’s also battling inflation with rising prices on nearly everything they purchase for their farm. As the industry faces higher costs, Sandidge says he continues to focus on managing risk, as well as hedging what they can while also wading through the uncertainty.
“One of the things that happens is we do get a recession, normally commodity prices go down, and so you don’t want to have too much bought ahead at the same time. It’s just a difficult time to be in business,” says Sandidge.
One Team
The Missouri pork producer admits those challenges mean he may only break even this year, but he hopes the strong start to the crops in area farm fields means producers will harvest a large crop this fall, since that crop will help feed his recovering hog herd.
“There’s so few of us actually involved in production agriculture today. If we don’t stick together, we’re not going to have much of a voice,” he says.
