Innovative farmers gear up to beat foreign oil
By ROGER PINCKNEY, Special to The T&D
Monday, September 04, 2006
When Rudolph Diesel introduced his engine at the 1900 Paris World’s Fair, he ran it on peanut oil. Perfect for tractors and electrical generators, he figured, since farmers could grow their own fuel. A few years later Henry Ford unveiled the Model T, designed to run on ethanol for the same reason.
The first John Deeres started on anything from gasoline to paint thinner, and once the engine heated up, you could throw a valve and switch to a low-grade kerosene, that sold, in those days, for about 3 cents a gallon. And they did not call them “Johnny Poppers” for nothing. Those old Model B’s and A’s would smoke and buck and snort – old timers will tell you – but they would really pull.
We’ve come a long way since then, backwards it suddenly seems.
The energy-efficient farm, and even the energy self-sufficient farm, are ideas that have been intriguing us since we gave up farming with mules. But with ongoing war in the Middle East, a hurricane wrecking the Gulf oil rigs, increased consumption by India and China, and petroleum prices setting new records nearly every month, those intriguing ideas have suddenly become urgent ones.
Clemson is experimenting, the Legislature is mandating, and the Feds are offering tax credits. Even Willie Nelson is involved, traveling the country in a bio-diesel bus, playing his classic heartbreak ?ballads, but also singing a new song, promoting his Bio Willie brand of fuel. “A future for farmers, a future for the environment,” he says.
It’s all about money and farmers have a sad history of being behind the power curve. Yeah, costs of production will be eventually factored into market price, but meanwhile there is hell to pay. Maybe not hell, but the banker, the fuel man, the fertilizer man and the like, hell enough for most folks.
“We simply got spoiled on cheap gas,” Alan Ulmer claims. Ulmer has a thousand acres of pasture and timber in Beaufort County, one of the few remaining farmers in the fastest-growing county in the state.
Ulmer “keeps the plow out of the ground” but still uses a lot of fuel choring his cattle, horses and goats and working his stands of timber. So Ulmer, well past the age where most men consider radical changes, wants to switch to bio-diesel.
Ulmer explains, “B-20 is a blend of regular fuel with 20 percent vegetable oil. Most tractors will run on that just fine. There are even some that will run on 100 percent corn oil. Of course the oil can come from sunflowers, soybeans, any oil seed crop.”
But Ulmer has words of caution about a sudden rush to bio-diesel. “There are environmental concerns. Activists are worried about us clear-cutting our woodland for oil crops. Maybe we should find a balance by making alcohol out of forest products, too.”
A bit of an activist, as well, Ulmer authored a resolution directing the South Carolina Farm Bureau to take a leading role in bio-diesel production. A good idea, since the squeezings from South Carolina’s 450,000 acres of soybeans would make 15,000,000 gallons of bio-diesel each year – and tack and estimated seven to 10 cents on the price of each bushel.
Bio-diesel can come from unlikely sources, too. There’s talk of cooking down beef tallow, even chicken fat from our considerable poultry production. In Charleston, Southeast Bio-Diesel has rented space in the abandoned Navy yard, intending to produce 2 million gallons a year from waste oil from the city’s many restaurants, with a target price of a buck fifty a gallon.
Odd indeed, but we need to get energy wherever we can get it.
South Carolinians have long prided themselves as a breed apart, first to secede from the Union and all that. But if South Carolina were its own country, it would be like North Korea, importing 98 percent of its energy. Five, 10 years from now, when you’re downwind of a tractor, it might smell like Colonel Sanders cooking lunch, but what happens in the meantime?
Alan Ulmer again: “We have the technology, we have the raw materials, we have the demand, but we don’t have the distribution. If I want bio-diesel, I have to drive clean to the other side of Statesboro, Ga., to get it.” But that will change. Spinx Oil of Greer sells B-20 at 11 upstate locations. Most of that goes into cars and trucks, but United Energy of Aiken is gearing up for farm deliveries.
Another obvious remedy for high-priced fuel is to simply use less of it. No-till or minimum-till practices have been well reported, as well as making “one pass” chemical applications.
Fertilizer costs – directly linked to the price of oil – can be reduced by rotating to nitrogen-fixing legumes, peanuts, clover and our ace-in-the-hole soybeans. ?Rusty Darby of Chester County does all of that – and more – by using GPS technology.
You likely know about GPS – Global Positioning Satellites – beeping in fixed orbits around the earth. Since the satellites don’t move, you can tell exactly where you are by your relative position from two or more of them.
Not only can you tell where you are, you can also tell where you have been and where you are going – and all with a little box no bigger than your first transistor radio. Mariners have been navigating with them for years, and now GPS is finding good use on the farm.
Rusty Darby farms cotton, wheat and milo. He applies chemicals with a sprayer with a 90-foot boom. There’s a laptop computer on the sprayer’s dash that’s wired into a GPS.
“It’s so simple,” Darby says, “there’s a picture of my field. Where I’ve sprayed is green, where I haven’t is blue. I don’t overspray and I don’t miss any patches, either.” What will they come up with next? Darby knows, ’cause he’s looking into it. “Guidance,” he says with obvious enthusiasm.
“Planters with GPS and a computer that steers the tractor. When you get to the end of the field, all you gotta do is turn the thing around. Say you’re planting 40-inch rows, the system is so accurate, it will get you within 1 inch.”
Can such wizardry save him money? “Well, yes it can, but I don’t look at it quite that way. It makes me money, and it saves time so I can go do something else.”
Over in Bamberg County, Richard Rentz grows 200 acres of peanuts. Peanut farmers are particularly hard hit by this energy crunch, as they are dependent on gas-fired driers to reduce moisture to around 10 percent.
“On a good year you can field dry them, but you’ll always be chancing the weather,” Rentz says.
Rentz can’t control the weather or the market price, but he can do something about propane. In 2005, Rentz joined with a couple dozen other farmers to form Southern Growers Association, which dries peanuts at a location just outside Branchville. Purchasing propane in bulk lowers the price somewhat, but Southern Growers took it one step further by allowing the propane supplier to build a 20,000-gallon substation on the association’s land. That assures a steady supply while dropping the price even further, as much as 13 cents a gallon.
What the association does not use goes to residential and commercial customers in Branchville, which has no natural gas service.
Normally, propane would be a poor second choice if you could get natural gas piped right to the dryer. But not anymore. If natural gas runs short, the gas company can shut down the line, directing fuel to residential users instead.
There’s a hit list, who gets cut first, second, and not even hospitals are immune. That’s exactly what happened in 2005 when ?Scana, the parent company of SCE&G, pulled the plug on the peanut harvest, leaving growers around Aiken and Orangeburg with no way to dry their crop.
Marty Phalen, Scana’s vice-president of gas operations, blames it on back-to-back hurricanes, Katrina and Rita. “We get our gas from the Gulf and when they pulled the crews off the rigs, it shut down production. It happens a lot down there and they are good at it, up and running in a matter of days.
“But these storms were so bad, there was no way to get the crews back to work, no boats, no docks, no roads to get to where the docks used to be.
“We were short on gas for six months. You just cannot let the pressure drop till 300,000 pilot lights flicker off in the Midlands, but a crop has to be dried, farmers and bankers have to get paid and people have to eat.”
The Farm Bureau protested, politicians got involved and Scana was authorized to buy gas on the open market. It was a lot more than most folks wanted to pay, but the gas started flowing again.
Lest you think Scana is lining their pockets with farm money, Phalen volunteers a surprising assertion:?“Scana does not make a nickle on gas. Cheap gas, expensive gas, Scana is a pass-through operation. Seventy to eighty percent of a farmer’s gas bill is for the gas. Scana gets paid for safe delivery and distribution.”
Phalen believes energy independence is obtainable, “if we have the political will.” He mentions vast gas fields off the East Coast that could be tapped with a lot less risk than poking around for oil in Arctic wildlife refuges. “It’s global competition and the price can change every hour. A gas tanker could be on its way from Africa to Savannah and if the Chinese bid enough, they will turn that ship around. We are in the gas business and we want to sell gas. But first, we have to get it.”
Not to be caught in another Katrina crack, another Rita rut, Phalen recommends the competition – a full propane tank. “Don’t be scrambling around at the last minute. If you need propane, everybody else will be needing it too.”
Scary? It sure is. But back to Alan Ulmer. “We have the technology, we have the raw materials, we have the demand.” Could we dry this year’s peanuts by burning the shells from last year’s crop? Could we make diesel from beans, propane from chicken litter, ethanol from pine tops? Can we use technology to eke every penny from every drop of fuel – fossil or homegrown – that we use?
We can and we will. Indeed, we must.
n This article is reprinted with permission from South Carolina Farmer, a publication of the S.C. Farm Bureau Federation.
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