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Survey: Collecting corn cobs for biofuels risky investment

Purdue survey finds government subsidies would likely be needed to attract more farmers to participate.
John Hawkins 
Published: Sep 1, 2010
Corn cobs could provide a future energy source, but farmers would have to receive a much higher price than previously thought to cover their costs and turn a profit, according to a Purdue University study.

Farmers would need to receive about $100 per dry ton from biofuels companies to persuade most to add a cob-collection operation during fall corn harvest, said agricultural economist Wallace Tyner and graduate student Matthew Erickson.

"That price is considerably higher than earlier estimates," Tyner said. "So while cobs could potentially become an important bioenergy feedstock, the high cost represents quite an impediment to development of the industry unless there are government subsidies."

Cellulosic biofuels can be made from cobs and other corn stover. A small percentage of corn farmers already collect cobs.

Tyner and Erickson found that more farmers might consider cob collection if the economic payoff was right. 

The two surveyed farmers who supplied cobs to a Minnesota ethanol company in 2009. That information was used to create a cob-harvesting operation for Purdue's B-21 PC-LP Farm Plan Model, a computer program that determines the return on a specific farm operation from production and other entered data.

Anonymous data from 55 farms represented at Purdue's 2009 Top Farmer Crop Workshop was used as the base for the B-21 computer simulation. The farms harvested a combined 100,264 acres of corn without cob collection in 2008. In each case, the computer program provided the farms the choice between corn harvest with and without cob collection.

The computer program projected that none of the 55 farms would begin collecting cobs if wagon rental was $28,000 and cobs brought $40 a ton. If farm operators received $100 a ton from biofuels producers, B-21 projected 22 of the 55 farms would collect cobs.




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