Bauer Long-Time Backer of Ethanol

By Jane Fyksen, Crops Editor
Thursday, January 24, 2008 12:29 PM CST

Dick Bauer remembers trying to fuel public interest in ethanol over two decades ago. Producing a photo of himself standing out in his cornfield next to a gas pump, this long-time ethanol supporter knew then that this day would come when he and fellow corn growers would feed the world n and help supply its ever-growing need for fuel.

While the gas-tank-in-the-cornfield PR stunt successfully caught the attention of at least one TV station, these days, this Pepin County producer is more behind-the-scenes in Wisconsin’s ethanol movement as a board member of one of the state’s six plants: Western Wisconsin Energy LLC at Boyceville. Nevertheless, he remains every bit as enthusiastic about the corn-based fuel.

Dick has something else to celebrate; 2008 is the 25th anniversary of Wisconsin’s corn checkoff, which was instrumental in getting an ethanol industry out of the start gate in this state. He was elected in December 1982 to serve on the very first Wisconsin Corn Promotion Board.

The board first met in early winter 1983, and its second meeting was the same day PIK bids were opened. Producer/members were all calling home to see what transpired with the new Payment-in-Kind program, which paid producers in commodities if they’d divert acreage over and above that required by the acreage reduction program and paid acreage diversion program. It followed on the heels of former president Jimmy Carter’s infamous embargo of grain to the Soviet Union.

Serving with Dick on that inaugural Corn Promo Board were: Bill Freise, Melrose; Paul Ruedinger, Fond du Lac; Clayton Nichols, Wisconsin Dells; Bill Pink, Lancaster; Jim Parman, Mazomanie; Jack Marks, Oconomowoc; Bob Hodge, Janesville; and Bob Oleson, Palmyra, who still serves, though now as the hired executive for both the promotion board and Wisconsin Corn Growers Association.

The Corn Promotion Board will hold its 25th annual meeting on Friday, Jan. 25, during Corn/Soy Expo at the Kalahari in Wisconsin Dells. The checkoff, which had been one-tenth of one cent since it was established, has just recently been raised to a half a penny for every bushel of corn sold. It is one of the oldest checkoff programs in the country.

It’s been an exciting 25 years for Wisconsin’s corn industry, as they have for this grower from Durand, who very much thinks renewable energy is “the right choice.” Dick says 100 acres of corn will yield about 14,000 bushels. Taken to an ethanol plant, it’ll produce 39,200 gallons of clean-burning ethanol fuel, not to mention distillers, a high-protein, high-quality feed “that farmers can take back home to feed their cattle, and thus, continue to feed the world.”

“The best part is that we can do it again next year, and again the following year,” stresses Dick of a source of energy that is “truly renewable.”

Nobody has to remind growers what demand for ethanol is doing for the price of corn. This life-long producer last year “and from here on out” adjusted his historical rotation of 50/50 corn/soybeans to two years of corn broken by a year of beans.

Dick and his wife, Betty, fly the U.S. and Wisconsin flags on their farm, true to its name Bauer’s Flag Farms. Married in 1967, they settled on what was Dick’s father’s second farm (though he now also owns his home farm a mile away). Betty, who is from Mondovi, was a stay-at-home mom and full participant in their family farm. Their five children are grown and gone now, leaving Dick and Betty once again a farming team of two. Their family, which includes three grandchildren now, returns to help with harvest and at other hectic times as well.

Like most farms, the Bauers’ has changed considerably over the years. Dick has supplemented his farm income with off-farm work. As a young farmer just launching the operation, he also went to work bagging fertilizer at the local co-op, which then sent him for training in heating and LP gas. He, in turn, helped start a new LP and heating department for the co-op (now known as Countryside Co-op at Durand) and managed the department for several years.

Today, at 61, Dick is looking to retire from 40 years as a journeyman in sheet metal. He’d take on general sheet metal work as it was available, installing heating systems for schools and other large commercial projects, like a hospital and the Alma power plant. He’s planning to concentrate solely on the grain operation this season.

Early last summer, Dick was hospitalized six days with a serious lung infection. Spoken like a farmer, he admits he probably should have been there sooner, but the crops took precedence. “I had to put the last pass of N on the corn. We do that rather uniquely. I couldn’t hire it done,” he defends.

Though recovered, he’s looking forward to staying closer to home, spending time on the tractor, save for directors’ meetings for the western Wisconsin ethanol plant.

The Bauers operate over 500 acres (very little of which is rented). The main farm is 160 acres n 125 of open land, the rest woods. His home farm, which Dick refers to as his “one-mile farm,” is 200 acres. The “five-mile farm” had been 145 acres, but he’s sold some of that land, leaving 64 acres on which to grow crops. His “Highway 10 farm” is three miles east of Durand and eight miles from his home. It isn’t, however, the farthest away. He also has a 40-acre parcel of heavy soil near Mondovi, which is 13 miles away from where he and Betty proudly fly the two flags in their picturesque farmyard.

While most of their cropland is sandy loam, Dick explains that they’ve stretched out the operation for heavier soil types, as a hedge against drought.

The last year or two, the Bauers have hired someone to drive tractor and planter, while Dick takes care of the subsoiler. They’ve traditionally hired the combining and trucking from their furthest fields. Betty works at the bins, taking moisture tests and test weights during harvest.

The Bauers are 100 percent no-till on both corn and beans. Dick can’t even recall when he first went no-till, but it was around the time he served on the state’s first corn promo board n sometime in the ‘80s.

While soybeans are drilled into cornstalks, Dick’s way of planting corn is still rather unique, though it’s catching on, he notes. It’s a variation of no-till, with all of the residue still on top and “virtually untouched,” he says of his reliance on a subsoiler with a long shank and 20-inch coulter.

His Yetter machine has six shanks in 30-inch spacings. It pulls through the soil 14 to 18 inches deep for deep tillage. However, it only creates a slot one-inch wide in which he puts the seed. “It slices the soil and leaves residue on top. It’s soft and malleable underneath n almost like plowed soil,” Dick describes, noting that any hard pans are fractured, too. “Very seldom do you get a hard pan deeper than 14 to 16 inches,” he remarks.

By pulling the planter over the top of the slots, he can use a lighter tractor, which prevents compaction. He puts duals in the front and back with no fluid or weights. “I try to make as light a footprint as I can,” he says.

First giving it a go some 30 years ago, he’s been relying on this method on all his corn acres for at least 10 years. Dick loves doing his own side-by-side “field trials.” He says there’s a 25-bushel yield advantage on their sandier ground to this practice.

Planting into subsoiled slots as he does, the corn roots can easily go deep. “On sandy soil, the roots need to get down quickly,” as a safeguard should Mother Nature decide to skimp on rain.

When their family was home, the Bauers had hay and rye in the rotation, too. They’d make 10,000 bales of hay over the summer and market and deliver 8,000 to 10,000 bales of rye straw. They sold alfalfa to dairies and some grassier hay to horse owners. Either Betty or one of the kids would ride along on deliveries to farms all over the state.

Their children n four daughters, and a son bringing up the rear - love to reminisce about the “good times” they had on the hay rack. A couple of the children played basketball, and baling hay the old-fashioned way gave them an advantage on the court. Hefting those 50-pound bales on a moving rack required good balance, grins their dad. They came off summer break already in shape for the season. Today, one of the Bauers’ daughters coaches women’s basketball at the University of Minnesota-Duluth.

The Bauers milked cows for a short time. They raised dairy heifers for a long time. They also raised veal calves on dairy cows, having several purchased calves nurse on one cow. Within a month or two, they have 200-pound veal calves to sell. Back then, grins Dick, the income they were gleaning from this offbeat enterprise was equivalent to what could be had milking the cows themselves.

This family also used to raise certified seed rye and grow soybeans for the Wisconsin Crop Improvement Association.

This innovative producer was selected as Outstanding Farmer of the Year in 2001 by the Pepin County Farm Management Club. He’d been on the board of Farm Credit Services out of River Falls, and formerly on the board for Pepin County Human Services. In 1987, Dick was the District 2 winner in the UW’s very first PEPS contest (Profits Through Efficient Production Systems). He produced soybeans that year for $2.92 a bushel. Just the year before, he’d been a winner when it was a yield contest by growing 53.415 bushels of beans to the acre.

As alluded, checking yields is almost a hobby for Dick. He likes nothing better than to conduct in-field comparisons of techniques. He soils tests routinely and fertilizes with zinc, boron and sulfur as needed. He’s seen a good yield response to adding extra zinc n more than normally comes in fertilizer. Next year, all his starter will have supplemental zinc. Dick notes, though, he’s also found with zinc that there’s such a thing as too much of a good thing

He makes three passes of nitrogen in a season. The first is starter. The second is a broadcast application of granular N. He waits until the corn is at that seventh to eleventh leaf stage, when the ear is determined. Then, he waits as long as he can and makes a third and final application of granular with a mounted PTO-driven spreader on the tractor that holds only a ton at a time. He goes over the top waiting as long as possible, “just so I don’t snap stalks off with the front axle of the tractor,” he remarks. Dick says can spread 24 rows at a time at an 8 to 10-mile-an-hour clip. “It’s not like pulling an anhydrous rig that takes a lot of power,” he compares.

On his sandy soil types, N goes one direction “and that’s down,” says Dick. He relies on humus in the upper 6 to 8 inches, and felt he’d previously been putting his N below that, hence, the switch to the granular broadcasting of nitrogen.

Up until last year, Dick grew only conventional varieties of corn and soybeans, reaping premiums paid for non-GMO. He’d send his corn to the river at Winona, Minn., and glean a per-bushel premium generally between 7 and 15 cents from Cenex/Harvest States. While that premium is more like 50 cents today (courtesy of an ethanol industry pulling in more corn), Dick is sending all of his crop to the WWE plant at Boyceville.

He’s still conventional on soybeans, going after that non-GMO premium on beans that go to the Twin Cities. He plants Iowa 1006, an old number but one he feels is very competitive on his farm. If he grows 50-bushel beans on his better ground, Dick feels he’s had a “pretty good year.” His sandy soils typically only give him 25 to 35 bushels though. It’s been very dry the last couple years in his neck of the woods, and Dick battled soybean aphids for yield, too

He forward contracts and has 20 bushels per acre of his soybeans forward-priced for the coming year. He says he’s “happy” with $9 a bushel beans. Dick belongs to the Dunn County Grain Marketing Club. Once a month in the winter, between one and two-dozen producers get together to “talk farmer talk” he notes.

On his solid-seeded beans last year he tried different fertility programs side by side and included a check where he didn’t apply any at all. He couldn’t get a significant yield response. Because he applies potash on corn for the following year’s beans, he wonders if maybe that’s why he didn’t see a yield response in the year of the crop.

As for the corn, he thought it was “toasted” due to last year’s drought. He still doesn’t know “how it survived as well as it did,” last season, when the faucet went off. The crop still came in with 90 bushels to the acre on poorer ground. On his good land, he averaged 160 bushels last year. However, across the whole farm (all of his far-flung acres), his corn averaged about 90 bushels, the beans 30.5.

Dick notes that he’s seen a significant yield advantage in planting Bt for corn borer.

This year will be his first year going with Roundup Ready corn, and all of it will be glyphosate-tolerant this season. That’s because he’s no longer after non-GMO premiums but instead delivering all of his crop to the ethanol plant.

In the past, he’d always come back for a second herbicide pass. He’d do a first pass, scout and spot spray (winding up treating maybe a fourth to half of the crop a second time) to get rid of those tough-to-kill weeds like sand bur and fall panicum, not to mention proso millet. Dick walks alongside his agronomist, Brad Mikelson with Countryside Co-op to scout his fields.

Some of the varieties he’s planting in ’08 will be triple stacks because that was all that was available. He doesn’t really need the Bt for rootworms, because most of his soil is sandy.

Dick opts for a plant population of 21,000 on sandy soil and 24,000 on his better ground. He says he’s not into bigger populations because even his better soil isn’t anywhere close to being as productive as what they’re farming down in Iowa and Illinois, where populations are being driven ever higher.

Years ago, he planted 14,000 and averaged 145 bushels across the whole farm, courtesy of two ears per stalk. “You can’t count on that anymore,” he says. “Now if you want big yield, you have to go with a bigger population.” That exposes him to more risk. He wishes he could still get varieties with that tendency for double ears.

As noted, he’ll do 70 to 80 yield checks, harvesting one-thousandth of an acre, which on 30-inch rows is about 17 feet. He records variety, field number, number of stalks and ears n on the bags the seed came in. This past year only highlighted again to Dick, who tends to have lighter ground, that “it’s all about water.” Spots 100-feet apart in a field yielded 133 bushels in the low spot but only 69 on the sandy knoll. Dick takes his seed-bag records and then draws detailed maps of his fields.

As noted, the opening of the 40-million-gallon ethanol plant, located between Boyceville and Wheeler n 47 miles from Dick’s home n is impacting many of his cropping decisions these days. The president is Paul Harrison, a Menomonie cash-cropper and state soybean leader. WWE rounded out its first year of operations last fall, having opened in late August 2006.

Dick says WWE has sought to be a good neighbor in Dunn County. It’s created well over 30 higher-paying jobs and added to the tax base. It’s raised the price growers get for their corn locally. The majority ownership in the plant is the Western Wisconsin Renewable Energy Cooperative with roughly 500 members. The other 40 percent is primary investors. Initially, stock was sold in a 10-county area in western Wisconsin. Dick is one of the founding members and on the board of both the co-op and WWE. He admits he got “so excited” over the initial talk about the possibility of building an ethanol plant in western Wisconsin.

When he served on the Wisconsin Corn Promotion Board in the ‘80s, the emphasis was just to make people aware of ethanol and its potential. “We were ahead of our time in believing in ethanol,” he reports of fellow grower/leaders in the state. However, the “timing just wasn’t right” at that time for an ethanol industry to take root, he admits.

Though margins are narrowing for ethanol producers, what with having to pay more for their major input n corn, distillers is a “natural hedge,” he remarks. As the price of corn goes up, so does the price of distillers. He says there’s no glut of distillers; it’s filling the void left by corn going into ethanol. WWE “can’t produce enough of it,” he says of the demand for this ethanol-co-product.

“Our country has made the right move in producing energy at the hands of agriculture, and the reason I think it will be successful beyond a doubt, is that farmers aren’t in farming to get rich. They like the family farm life-style. Historically they’ve produced the cheapest food in the world. Who better to have part of the responsibility for now producing energy?” says Dick.

Farmers have done an outstanding job feeding the world’s ever-growing population by producing ever-larger yields. Agriculture is new in the energy business. Rest assured, “we’ll get better at it,” he says, with pride in his industry.

And “the neatest thing” about growing energy in a farmer’s field, concludes Dick, is that producers “can do it again next year.”

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