Driven by quest for alternative fuel, corn production is growing across Mid-South

Memphis Business Journal
June 1, 2007
By C. Richard Cotton

If you've noticed more cornfields growing alongside Mid-South roads and highways, you're witnessing a trend in agriculture. Whether that trend of growing more corn, often to the detriment of cotton, to satisfy a growing thirst for ethanol continues depends on many factors.

"We usually have 300 acres of corn," says R.M. English, who farms 4,500 acres in Haywood County around Brownsville with his father, Robert English.

This year, the father-son partnership added 200 acres of corn, for a total of 500 acres: "It was because of the higher price, but corn is also a good rotation crop for cotton," says R.M. English. That extra 200 acres of corn reduced their cotton acreage to 2,200 acres this year.

English says he and his father didn't consider more corn because "we're set up to raise cotton," referring to the bulk of their equipment.

Plenty of other growers, though, have moved acreage formally reserved for cotton into corn. A quest for alternative fuels to supplant imported petroleum-based fuels is driving the change down on the farm.

"There are 80 some-odd ethanol refineries being built (in the U.S.)," says Bill Griffin, program director of the International Cotton Institute, held at the University of Memphis during the summer. "Corn is a no-brainer."

Griffin says the decrease in cotton acreage and accompanying increase in corn acreage "is pretty much a U.S. phenomenon" that isn't going on in other cotton-producing locales.

Jim Nunn, owner of Nunn Cotton Co., Inc., in Brownsville, says Tennessee is looking at a 30%-35% decrease in cotton acreage this growing season.

He's in the business of buying and selling cotton; with a third less cotton than is usually available, Nunn anticipates a much tighter market for buyers like him and possibly higher prices. That will be a turnaround from last year, when Nunn says cotton prices were down while the price of corn and other grains was up.

"As the year progresses, people will become more disgusted with cotton," Nunn says. "They're looking for alternative crops."

As for the 2008 growing season, Nunn figures corn, and possibly other grains, will remain strong. Cotton, though, is not going away.

"I've looked at the historical data and some of the land will stay in cotton," Nunn says. He points out that cotton gin owners, many of whom own or control vast tracts of farmland, will continue to cultivate cotton to feed their ginning operations.

Gins, Nunn says, are only one segment of cotton-industry operators that will suffer from reduced acreage; add to that list storage warehouses, equipment suppliers and repairers and trucking firms.

While cotton is an expensive crop to raise -- gene technology licenses that pay for seed modified to resist certain pests can run production costs above $100 per acre -- corn embodies "some hazards," as Griffin points out.

Mid-South soils generally can support corn only one season before it should be rotated out. There is also a shortage of storage capacity for corn and it generally needs irrigation to guarantee success, while cotton does not.

Irrigation is something holding R.M. English back from planting more corn: "Corn is a pretty risky crop and we don't irrigate." He reports that his corn "needs rain bad right now."

The current rain-starved English corn crop is the second crop this season; the first planting was killed by the late freeze that occurred around Easter. English says replanting costs nearly $50 per acre.