There’s gold in the fields around Flandreau.
Both the deep yellow of corn ready for harvest and the future potential of better prices because of an expansion of ethanol use hold promise as rich as the precious metal.
Moody County is one of the strongest producers of corn in the state based on bushels harvested. Last year, for example, the county’s farmers took out 24 million bushels of corn out of their fields as part of the state’s total of 800 million bushels. In the two previous years, the county’s harvest was 27.89 million bushels in 2016 and 24.45 million bushels in 2015.
Recently, President Trump vowed to cut through paperwork issues to make it so that E-15 ethanol blended fuel is available year-round instead of only October through May. Industry experts predict that if successfully implemented, E-15 expansion will mean a need for 2 billion more bushels of corn over the next few years.
It’s a given that South Dakota farmers will benefit because they won’t have to compete as much selling grain in foreign markets, and consumers who choose to use E-15 instead of the common E-10 will get pay up to 10 cents a gallon less at the pump for the higher blend.
Those are all very real and modern-day issues that hit farmers and the rest of us folks in our wallets.
But this week, it’s refreshing to imagine back to the days before modern combines with computers in a climate-controlled cab scooped up the harvest. Moody County gets its first shot at hosting the National Corn Husking Contest on Jim and Deb Redder’s farm this weekend. The Redders and their neighbors put on the old-fashioned show, in part, so that people don’t forget how farming uses to be and how physically draining harvest could be.
Farmers were machines, picking corn by hand an ear at a time, husking it and loading it in a corn crib to feed the livestock during the winter. Like a lot of things, we wouldn’t necessarily want to go backwards in technological advances, but we like the nostalgia and the history, too.
Corn production at one point was mostly for keeping cattle and hogs alive. Now, it both feeds a hungry world and puts ethanol-blended gas in your car, too.
The government keeps some pretty good records of crop yields over the years. Looking at a sampling from several different decades show how far production has jumped with modern farming practices.
In 1940, for example, Moody County farmers produced 1.66 million bushels of corn at an average of 18.9 bushels an acre. Fast forward to 1970, when the yields were 4.79 million bushels overall and 55 bushels an acre.
In 2000, the number kept climbing to 15.04 million bushels and 143.2 bushels an acre.
When those following the Gold Rush proclaimed, “There’s gold in them hill,” they had their eyes set on something west of us. They couldn’t have foreseen the production yields of the past few years and the expansion of ethanol that have occurred right before our eyes.
Sometimes, if we’re not farmers ourselves, we forget the importance of their yields and profits, their ability to feed the world and now fuel its engines. That’s despite soil-soaking rains and other conditions that put everything farmers do at risk.
Whether it’s the hand harvest of corn for a state and national competition or the full hoppers dumped from combines that are combing through county fields this fall, the golden kernels hold a substantial significance.
