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The nation’s corn growers continue to lobby in Washington for a year-round solution to E15 or Unleaded 88 availability at gas stations across the country. The 1st Vice President of National Corn Growers Association, Matt Frostic, says that is their number one legislative issue.
“The political appetite is right in DC to try and get that pushed through, we just need a pathway to get it done,” he said. “And that’s a struggle given the atmosphere in DC of getting anything done, so we’re really looking at any strategy that can get it attached to any bill here moving forward through December. There’s some promise there. Staff is working hard to negotiate that and work through some of those roadblocks. We do have certain key senators that we have to get through to get that on the floor for a vote.”
Frostic says NCGA is also working to bring down the very high cost of inputs farmers rely upon.
“I head a committee right now that we formed back in the summer to kind of look and deal with some of these issues and our staff has put together some great data that kind of charts it from 2007 to now. We can see some of the hiccups in those graphs of what happened, and so we spent some time going to different conferences within the industry to see more intimately what’s going on, say in fertilizer so that we can understand how we can help to bring those prices down.”
He said they do have some ideas on how to help, but “there’s no home runs out there,” he explained. “We’re going to hit some singles and hopefully get some runners across, but dropping the tariffs is going to help. There are also other things that we can probably do domestically that will help mitigate some of those inputs, and it’s not just fertilizer. It’s seed, it’s equipment, it’s everything.”
NCGA’s numbers are $160-170 negative margins per acre for corn growers this year, not feasible for very long, he says. Frostic farms in the thumb of Michigan, roughly eighty miles north of Detroit.