View From the Cab

By David Tollefson, Columnist

Thanks to a good friend who lives in Wisconsin, but whose family has vacation property in Pope County. He alerted me to an article originally printed in the Des Moines, Iowa Register, but published in the January 5, 2025 issue of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinal, concerning the future of jet fuel from feedstocks grown on Mid-western farms.  The article is written by Donnelle Eller, and is subtitled “Hopes Green Jet Fuel will lift Farmers’ income.”  Here is the article, edited for length:

Mitchell Hora has been bombarded with calls from clients, wondering what President-elect Donald Trump’s election victory will mean for farmers hoping ethanol will be used to make the next generation of jet fuel.

Calling climate change a “hoax,” Trump has vowed to gut the Inflation Reduction Act, a 2022 law that seeks to cut the pollution that contributes to global warming and includes a tax credit that would help supercharge the development of sustainable aviation fuel.

Aviation contributes about 2.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions and is considered a hard-to-decarbonize industry. Farmers in Iowa, the nation’s largest producer of ethanol and the corn it’s derived from hope to snag some of what could be billions of dollars in tax incentives meant to cut carbon in the 35-billion-gallon-a-year jet fuel market.

Hora, the founder and CEO of Continuum Ag in Washington, Iowa, a town of 7,300 people, said the Inflation Reduction Act’s incentives for clean fuel production have bipartisan support, with legislation already introduced to extend it.

Hora works to enable farmers to capitalize on the potential jet fuel market while also adopting practices that can benefit the environment and help preserve the viability of their land.

Farmers and rural communities that would benefit from the tax incentives largely supported Trump’s bid to return to the White House, said Geoff Cooper, CEO of the Renewable Fuels Association, a St. Louis industry lobbying group.

Supporters will encourage the incoming president to take a “judicious and surgical approach to any kind of reforms and claw backs” of the federal law, Cooper said. “In addition to combating the impacts of climate change, these programs are also driving investment and creating jobs and spurring innovation and economic growth in rural communities and red states that voted for Trump.”

While the clean fuel tax credits in Iowa have been tied to controversial proposals to build carbon capture pipelines across the state, Hora’s interest lies in conservation practices that farmers can adopt to cut ethanol’s environmental footprint—with or without a pipeline.

“I don’t necessarily love government tax credits, but it could start moving some money to farms and doing some really good things—not just for carbon capture, but for water quality, biodiversity and flood mitigation,” Hora said.

That helped persuade him to shift his company’s focus two years ago from agronomy to helping farmers calculate their crops’ environmental footprint so they could benefit from the federal incentives to reduce them.

“The impact that it can make on soil health and family farms is just tremendous,” said the 30-year-old entrepreneur, especially with growers struggling with low commodity prices and falling income.

Ethanol proponents have touted carbon capture pipelines—two of which are now proposed in Iowa—as the best way to ensure the renewable fuel’s future viability, especially as the nation has pushed toward electric vehicles.

But Hora’s objective is different. He hit about 50 national conferences last year, held dozens of webinars and joined podcasts and agriculture radio shows, seeking to get the word out that making low-carbon ethanol could win farmers themselves a share of incentives for adopting conservation practices. They include planting cereal rye cover crops that prevent soil erosion and fertilizer loss and no longer using tillage that releases carbon stored in the soil.

Many farmers have hesitated, however, concerned about the cost and potential yield loss. That’s especially important with the farm downturn that’s already slashed about 4,100 jobs across the state and is expected to ripple into other industries, costing up to 11,400 positions and slashing $1.5 billion from the state economy, according to an Iowa Farm Bureau Federation analysis.

The clean fuel credit could help boost farm incomes, said Hora, a seventh-generation farmer.

“This is the biggest carrot by far for farmers,” he said, enticing them to invest in conservation measures that could bring them $75 to $100 an acre. “That’s huge.”

Hora, who started Continuum Ag while a student at Iowa State University, put together the business plan as a freshman. He knew he wanted to come back to southeast Iowa and be involved with farming, but the family operation wasn’t big enough to support two families.

His company first built software to track farmers’ soil health efforts. He then moved to measuring carbon intensity, tracking how much farmers were cutting their corn and soybean’s environmental impact and what that could mean in revenue.

The Inflation Reduction Act’s tax incentives for the next generation of renewable fuel became “a light bulb moment for me,” he said, knowing that he could help farmers measure, monitor, report and verify their climate efforts.

Hora’s company charges $7 an acre to document and verify farmers’ conservation practices to make them eligible for federal incentives. “You need to know what your score is and what it’s worth,” he said.

But whether ethanol will become a source of sustainable jet fuel is unclear. Federal agency leaders, scientists and renewable fuel and environmental groups have argued over the size of ethanol’s environmental footprint and how best to assess it. And the federal government has indicated that only simultaneous use of three conservation practices—no-till farming, planting cover crops and taking measures that prevent nitrogen loss—may count toward lowering corn-based ethanol’s environmental footprint.

Hora expects the federal government will expand the practices that it will count toward cutting carbon. And many groups are asking that they not be bundled.

Late last year, farmers and biofuels producers were hoping the government would soon issue rules for the new tax credits, often referred to as 45Z, which went into effect Jan. 1.

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