Views from the Cab

By David Tollefson, Columnist

For anyone traveling on Minnesota’s highways, it’s pretty obvious what the #1 crop in the state is: CORN.

But, of course, there is more than one kind of corn. Coming out of the ground until the time of tasseling, all corn looks pretty much the same. Sweet corn is generally a couple feet shorter than field corn, and the tassels seem to be somewhat whiter than field corn, depending on variety variation. Also, sweet corn cobs are generally smaller than field corn.

Sweet corn as a field crop is only about 1 percent of total corn acres in Minnesota.

Recently the Minneapolis StarTribune had an interesting article written by Christopher Vondracek titled “Minnesota is a top corn producer. But how much of it is eaten by humans?”

Vondracek begins his column this way:

Sweet corn has had a year.

When a 7-year-old boy this summer exclaimed the couldn’t “imagine a more beautiful thing” than the corn-cob-on-a-stick in his hand, he simultaneously broke the Internet and reminded everyone to get a little more scrumptious maize in their lives.

Minnesota is one of the nation’s top producers of sweet corn. But the state’s vast cornfields give a somewhat misleading impression about how much of the “big lump with knobs”-as the child described it in a viral video–is being grown for humans.

Reader Ken Collier asked Curious Minnesota, the Star Tribune’s reader-powered reporting project, about the purpose for all this corn. He has wondered while driving around the state what becomes of all the corn he sees growing in roadside fields.

“How much of that is destined to be eaten?” Collier asked. “And how much goes to industrial purposes, either ethanol or some other chemical?

Minnesota farms produced 1.4 billion bushels of corn in 2021, which is the equivalent of roughly 78 billion pounds of the stuff. Only three states grew more corn: Iowa, Illinois and Nebraska, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). But this bounty generally isn’t what Americans want at their picnic.

Humans eat sweet corn. And only a sliver (about 1%) of Minnesota’s harvest lands for sale on the back of a Ford Econoline or buttered at a summer barbecue.

A lion’s share of what’s grown in the state – roughly two-thirds of those 8 million acres – is for grain that is either devoured by livestock or transported to ethanol facilities.

Thirty-eight percent of Minnesota’s corn harvest in 2021 went to meal for cattle, dairy cows, turkeys, chickens and pigs, according to USDA.

The next highest off-ramp for corn is ethanol. According to industry numbers, about 29% of Minnesota’s harvest was used in 2021 to make ethanol, which is further mixed with petroleum to make a fuel blend that powers vehicles.

As a percentage, this pales to neighbors South Dakota and Iowa, where over 50% of their respective bushels go to ethanol.

Next, a sizable chunk of the state’s corn is exported. Over 16% of Minnesota’s corn is put on rail or freighted by barge out of a Mississippi River port. That amounts to roughly $1.1 billion worth of corn, says the Minnesota Corn Growers Association.

Some more corn – roughly 450,000 acres – goes into silage, when the whole plant is chopped up, stalk and all, for livestock food.

Finally, small percentages of the state’s corn ends up processed into a variety of products, from high fructose corn syrup to cornstarch and industrial alcohols, according to the national corn lobby.

Still, some farmers are growing the corn we eat. Those roadside stands and boxes of corn in the grocery store are not a mirage. Across Minnesota, farmers harvested more than 93,000 acres of sweet corn in 2021. I’m not sure how many acres are grown in Pope County, but I’ll bet it is a few thousand, especially around the Brooten area.

In fact, Minnesota’s sweet corn haul was the second-largest in the nation and represented a quarter of the country’s overall production, according to the USDA.                                      

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Switching to soybeans, also in the StarTribune, and by the same author Christopher Vondracek, with headlines “CHS sees ‘bullish’ demand in soybean oil citing renewable diesel.” A West Coast hungry for renewable diesel to combat climate change has driven a surge in Minnesota’s backyard for oil extracted from crushed soybeans.

From Mankato, Minn., in part:

Where the Blue Earth River empties into the Minnesota River, a plant has been crushing farmers’ soybeans since the 1930’s.

One of the largest soybean oil-producing refineries in the world, the facility has been humming since California’s aggressive low-carbon fuel standard triggered higher demand for renewable feedstocks from diesel manufacturers.

“More gets crushed here (in Mankato) on a daily basis than anywhere in the world,” says Joe Smentek, executive director of the Minnesota Soybean Growers Association. “The industry goes quietly about its business, but it’s a huge economic driver for the state.”

Last fall, CHS, the nation’s largest farmer-owned cooperative, announced a $60 million expansion project to the Mankato refinery, which extracts oil from flattened soybeans.

Historically, most of that oil has been processed for human consumption, such as in salad dressings or cooking oils. But CHS leadership says the facility will also aim to fill in a “demand pull” from a West Coast increasingly seeking cleaner-burning deisel fuels, some made from soybean oil.

“The demand pull, just for California, has created this exuberance,” said John Griffith, CHS’ ag business vice president, in an interview late last month. “You could consume all of the soybeans that we export to the world, just in those two markets (California and New York).”

While 80% of the beans are crushed and made into meal, which is mostly fed to livestock, another 20% goes into extracted oil.

The question 20 years ago was, “What are we going to do with all the soybean oil?” Smentek said. “Now, we ask, “What are we going to do with all this soybean meal?

It’s this demand that CHS says it’s chasing. The cooperative finished a $105 million expansion last year at a soybean crush facility in Fairmont, Minn., just north of the Iowa border. Plant workers say they see as many as 500 trucks a day, many bringing crushed soybeans back up to Mankato for refining.

As possible solutions stack up for America’s push to greener fuels, the little bean grown in the heartland can’t afford not to play a role.

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Please contact David Tollefson with thoughts or comments on this or future columns at: adtollef@hcinet.net