Corn Growers Meeting Production Challenges

One of the presenters here at the National Ethanol Conference was Rick Tolman, CEO of the National Corn Growers Association. Rick gave a great speech in which he provided a significant amount of data supporting the benefits of ethanol production using corn and that dispel many of the myths that seem to be lingering in the media and general public.

There are so many facts and figures in his talk that I don’t want to try to cover them all here. But for example, on one of his slides he shows that in 1944 we got 2.8 million bushels of corn off of 85 billion acres while just last year we got 13.1 billion bushels off the same number of acres. His point being that we’re getting more efficient in corn production. He also pointed out that companies like Monsanto are projecting that we’ll double the number of bushels harvested per acre in the near future as technology continues to develop.

You can listen to Rick’s speech here: Rick Tolman Speech (20:00 MP3 file)