BY SUSAN ERLER, Times of Northwest Indiana
serler@nwitimes.com
Rob Churchill up to this year had shipped grain from his family's Lake Village-area farm to markets in Hammond and Lafayette for processing into livestock feed and other food products.
The Iroquois Bio-Energy plant under construction in Rensselaer provides a whole new market, and one nearly in the Churchills' back yard.
"Anytime you've added a market in your back yard, basically that creates competition," Churchill said. "And anytime you have competition that's a good thing."
Iroquois Bio-Energy general manager Keith Gibson estimates as many as 50 area farmers will supply corn to make ethanol at the plant.
"There are a couple of the big ones that could do a quarter of the business," Gibson said.
"The vast majority will be from Northwest Indiana," he added, "with maybe a couple from just across the border in Illinois."
Ohio based agricultural firm The Andersons Inc. has an agreement to buy all the grain for the Iroquois Bio-Energy ethanol plant.
The company is recruiting suppliers by spreading the word to more than 100 local farmers, the company's Mike Anderson said.
Some they already knew. Others were invited to meetings.
"Quite a few" already are committed, Mike Anderson said.
Demand for ethanol as both a fuel additive and, in higher concentrations, a fuel alternative, has intensified as gas prices rise and Americans look for alternatives to foreign petroleum.
In Indiana alone, 11 new ethanol plants are planned or under construction -- capable of producing nearly 940 million gallons of ethanol.
Currently, the state has just one operating plant, New Energy Corp. in South Bend, with capacity for 102 million gallons.
Nationwide, plants with capacity for about 2 billion gallons of ethanol are under construction, adding to existing capacity of 4.8 billion gallons.
Ethanol prices are rising as demand grows.
"For the people who own these ethanol plants, it is just absolutely liquid gold right now," Purdue University agricultural economist Chris Hurt said.
Finding corn to feed the ethanol plants is the next big challenge.
Farmers in Indiana, as in other states, could begin shifting more acreage from soybeans to corn.
By as early as next year, the split could be 60 percent to 40 percent, corn to soybeans, Hurt said, compared to the current division of 52 percent corn to 48 percent soybeans.
Another 700,000 acres of Indiana farmland could be devoted to growing corn just to meet the demands of the four ethanol plants currently under construction in Indiana, Hurt said.
"The ethanol demand is just a really big growth factor," Hurt said.
"For all of agriculture, it is a new challenge."