Presumptive Republican nominee Sen. John McCain visited the Iowa State Fair on Friday.

U.S. Sen. John McCain promised to open new markets for Iowa agricultural products during a visit to the Iowa State Fair.

“I get a chance to come here and meet and greet the real America, the people that are providing products all over this world,” said McCain. “All over the world, people are consuming the quality products that are produced right here in the great state of Iowa. And I want to say thank you for that. And my mission and my job as president of the United States, one of them, will be to make sure that every market in the world is open to your products.”

The presumptive Republican presidential nominee spoke to a crowd of several hundred people who had gathered at the Des Moines Register building at the fair, emphasizing the value that can be added to pork products when new markets are opened up around the world. McCain was joined by his wife, Cindy, as well as fellow Republican, Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Bill Northey.

Iowa Farm Bureau Federation President Craig Lang also stood with McCain during the speech. Northey and Lang — two long-time, vocal supporters of government programs that promote ethanol –applauded as McCain discussed his views on energy policy, despite McCain’s opposition to federal subsidies for renewable fuels.

“I want to tell you, we will disagree from time to time,” said McCain. “I believe in renewable fuels. I don’t believe in ethanol subsidies. But I believe in renewable fuels. I believe we have to do all of those things to restore our economy, but my friends, we will disagree on a specific issue, and that’s healthy.”

Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain speaks to the crowd at the Iowa State Fair. He was joined by Iowa agriculture secretary Bill Northey and Iowa Farm Bureau Federation president Craig Lang.

The Arizona senator said that the United States needs to enact an “all of the above” strategy to attempt to achieve energy independence. “We must achieve energy independence,” he said. “I call it the Lexington Project. It’s got to be wind, tide, solar, nuclear. Nuclear power has to be part of any solution. My friends, we’re a long way from the ocean, but we’ve got to drill offshore and we’ve got to drill now.”

McCain ridiculed a statement from his Democratic opponent, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., who had called on Americans to check for proper tire inflation to reduce fuel costs. “My friends, I’m all in favor of inflating our tires, don’t get me wrong. But that’s a public service announcement, it’s not an energy policy.”

The presidential candidate also visited various Iowa State Fair landmarks Friday, constantly surrounded by curious fair-goers as he viewed such displays as the famous Butter Cow and the 1,250-pound winner of the largest boar contest.

Following McCain’s speech, Iowa Independent interviewed Iowa Democratic Party Chairman Scott Brennan and Iowa House Agriculture Committee Chairman Rep. John Whitaker.

Iowa Democratic Party chairman Scott Brennan and Iowa House Agriculture Committee chairman Rep. John Whitaker respond to McCain's visit at the fair.

Whitaker said McCain is apparently out of touch with what is happening right now in the grain markets. “He talked about the export market, but he apparently didn’t check the markets this morning,” said Whitaker. “The dollar went up and corn and beans just plummeted overnight because of that. You know, they were up yesterday, then boom. One little bit of news on the dollar and then you have a lack of exports because of that. And our export market dries up like a hot August wind.”

Brennan said McCain’s opposition to renewable fuels programs in the past has put the Republican candidate at odds with Iowa’s values. “He’s against the farm bill and against the ethanol subsidies, and has been from the get-go,” said Brennan. “He’s just wrong for Iowa. He’s always been wrong for Iowa.”

Brennan went on to say McCain’s 10th-place finish in the Republican Straw Poll last year and his fourth-place finish in the Iowa Republican caucuses is enough to show that the candidate does not understand Iowa’s values. “Iowans, the little bit they know of him, they haven’t liked him,” said Brennan. “And for good reason. He doesn’t stand up for Iowa values.”

The source of the information in the Reuters article is an unnamed “government official with knowledge of the matter.”

The federal renewable fuels standard currently requires 9 billion gallons of renewable fuels to be blended into the gasoline supply. The request for a waiver, submitted to the EPA in April by Texas Gov. Rick Perry, would have cut the standard in half if approved by the EPA.

Texas is a stronghold of the oil industry and is also a major cattle feeding state. Cattle feeders had claimed that the renewable fuels standard was driving up the price of corn, an important livestock feed.

Corn prices had risen to record highs, near $8 per bushel, earlier this year when disastrous flooding throughout Iowa and the upper Midwest had caused concerns about the ability of farmers to grow a crop. But corn prices have fallen steadily since then as the condition of corn in the Midwest has improved significantly. December corn was trading at $5.27 per bushel Wednesday at the Chicago Board of Trade.

Grassley was referring to an elaborate anti-ethanol smear campaign, masterminded by Washington lobbyist firm Glover Park Group and bankrolled by the Grocery Manufacturers Association, which was recently exposed in a May 14 article in Roll Call magazine. Glover Park's plan involved exploiting a world shortage of certain food grains while blaming ethanol production for the rise in world food prices.

According to Roll Call, Glover Park was hired for $300,000 to craft the anti-ethanol campaign, which the GMA hoped would involve "taking advantage of the 'extraordinary earned media opportunities' caused by rising food prices; mobilizing local food banks and 'other local opinion leaders in key states and districts'; and hiring 'trusted third-party experts' to document" the effect of ethanol incentives.

Glover Park created a plan to "obliterate whatever intellectual justification" exists for ethanol derived from corn, which would involve demonstrating to policy makers that "there is a political price to allowing ethanol policy to drive up the cost of food." Click here to read the full Glover Park memo in .pdf format.

Mainstream media appeared to have bought the story hook, line and sinker. But Grassley pounced on the news in that Roll Call article, delivering a scathing speech on the Senate floor that he says has rallied renewable fuels advocates to redouble their efforts in defense of ethanol.

"I think maybe my speech on the Senate floor a couple weeks ago was the genesis," said Grassley. "We're finding some increasing support now."

Grassley said that the anti-ethanol campaign is still way ahead of the curve. "They were about a month ahead of us before we realized what they were trying to do. But I think you're going to find renewable fuels people and their allies start a counterattack."

Some reports have stated that as much as $15 million has been dedicated to the anti-ethanol campaign, with a $5 million contribution from the GMA and as much as $10 million kicked in by the American Petroleum Institute.

Grassley said he didn't know if renewable fuels advocates could offset that multimillion-dollar public relations assault. "But we hope to embarrass the grocery manufacturers out of it, because they're part of the food chain and they shouldn't be pitting farmers against consumers," said Grassley.

The video below is Grassley's May 15 speech on the Senate floor where he blasted the GMA and Glover Park Group.

The Arizona senator's presidential campaign almost met an early demise last summer here in Iowa, and it's often said that his troubles were due in part to his well-documented opposition to ethanol tax credits.

Now that McCain is the presumptive Republican nominee, those troubles may come back to haunt him once again in the battleground states of the Corn Belt.

Corn growers in particular have reason to question McCain's positions on agricultural issues. He didn't do himself any favors by skipping important votes on the Farm Bill in December, and he didn't score well on an in-depth study of the presidential candidates' positions conducted last year by the Iowa Corn Growers Association.

"As corn growers, we know that (Sen. McCain's) past record does not necessarily support our same position on many issues," said ICGA director Don Elsbernd in an e-mail response to a question from Iowa Independent. "But we are confident that we will be able to work with each presidential candidate to make sure that agriculture and agriculture policy continue to be an important part of our democratic process."

Through its Targeted Agricultural Education Project, the ICGA identified 12 of the issues most important to corn growers and compiled information on each of the Republican and Democratic candidates' positions on those issues. The subjects involved ethanol, of course, as well as transportation, trade and Farm Bill issues.

McCain was in agreement with the ICGA on only three of the 12 issues, while Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., and Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., both were in agreement with the ICGA on 11 of the 12 issues.

Mindy Larsen Poldberg, ICGA's director of government relations, told Iowa Independent that the project lasted for more than nine months as the ICGA studied all of the presidential candidates' positions.

"We worked with every presidential candidate and their staffs in order to find out their views on agriculture," said Poldberg. "We will not be endorsing any one candidate. But our job was to collect information on what we thought were the 12 most important issues for Iowa farmers this year, and determine what each candidate's positions are, whether they were Republican or Democrat."

The ICGA studied the candidate's views on the 51-cent blender's ethanol tax credit, a renewable fuels standard, ethanol import tariffs, trade promotion authority and the Farm Bill safety net. McCain scored well on Farm Bill subjects and trade issues but got a black "X" for his views on the ethanol tax credit.

The results of the project were mailed out shortly before the Iowa caucuses to the approximately 6,000 members of the ICGA. The results of the project are now posted on the National Corn Growers Association's Web site and are available to NCGA members all over the country.

"The candidates' past positions on our issues are absolutely important," said Poldberg. "However, I would like to think that whoever is elected to be president of the United States would take a look at the energy and agriculture needs of this country and take a more national view toward those things."

But the energy bill that passed was merely a shadow of its former self, as a 15 percent renewable electricity standard and provisions for new taxes on oil companies were stripped out.

Ethanol and biodiesel producers will have plenty to celebrate, as the bill calls for the use of 36 billion gallons of renewable fuels by 2022, a significant increase from the approximately 5 billion gallons of ethanol last year. Under the bill, 21 billion gallons of biofuels will be required to come from sources other than corn-based ethanol by 2022.

The bill will raise fuel efficiency standards for cars and light trucks for the first time since the 1970s. Fleet-wide fuel economy will be raised to 35 miles per gallon, up from today's level of 25 mpg.

President Bush, who had threatened to veto the bill last week, is signaling that he will sign the bill now that the tax increases and renewable electricity standard have been removed.

Like this June Washington Post article, which boldly declared that "the corn price increases flow like gravy down the food chain, to grocery stores and menus." It states "the nation's unquenchable thirst for gasoline — and finding an alternative to what's been called our addiction to oil — has produced an unintended consequence: The cost of the foods that fuel our bodies has jumped. Beef prices are up. So are the costs of milk, cereal, eggs, chicken and pork. And corn is getting the blame."

Or just read the first sentence of this Newsweek International article, published last week under the ominous title "Blame It on Biofuels." The article starts off by saying: "High food prices always hit the poor hardest, and these days there is plenty of bad news. Corn prices are nearly $4 a bushel, almost double their 2005 level."

The fact is, corn prices have been trending downward for almost eight months. Today at the Chicago Board of Trade, September corn is going for about $3.25 a bushel. But consumer food prices have not followed that downward trend.

Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Bill Northey told Iowa Independent this week that prices farmers are paid for their crops have only a minor effect on final prices at the grocery store.
"We've seen it all through history — it seems like farm prices get blamed for consumer prices going up. We've seen that constantly," said Northey, who is a corn and soybean farmer. "But we've never seen them say that things got cheaper because of farm prices. If you look at our prices, our prices are no higher now than decent prices were back in the '90s, or back even in the '70s."

A lot of people, he said, are making excuses for higher consumer food prices and they're not being altogether honest. "They're blaming the farmer when our prices aren't at all out of line. And it's usually a very tiny portion of those final consumer prices. If you look at popcorn, you look at even meat, it's not a huge portion. And each of them have their own demand-and-supply situation."
Very few farms can pass on their costs, he explained. "They just get what is the market price for their products. There may be some of those consumer prices that increased at the same time that the corn price increased, but many of those haven't gone down the way corn's gone down since January. We had $4 corn and now we have corn in the $3.15 and $3.20 range. So let's don't blame corn or ethanol for those higher prices."

A recent American Farm Bureau Federation study showed that the value of the corn that is used to make a box of corn flakes is less than a nickel. Grain prices make a difference in consumer food prices, but according to that study, only slightly.

What is more likely to affect food prices is the overall cost of energy for production and transportation of the products — and even more significantly, as stated in that Newsweek article referenced above, rising global demand for food. As that article says, in the second to last paragraph, "perhaps the most significant factor is rising wealth, particularly in the developing world. Since 2002, the combined GDP of the 24 largest emerging markets has doubled, according to Bank of America, and per capita income has risen by nearly 14 percent a year. As families get richer, they can more regularly indulge in meat and dairy products. In China, beef consumption has gone up by 26 percent since 2000, and pork, which was already popular, rose by 19 percent." 

As reported here on Iowa Independent, corn farmers have a big crop coming this fall, and a corn shortage is not expected. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has projected that 2007 will bring the second-largest corn crop in history.

Lead sponsors of the event were the Iowa Corn Growers Association and the Iowa Corn Promotion Board, highlighting the fact that Indy league cars are all fueled by pure ethanol. Driver Dario Franchitti won the race and will go down in history as the first-ever winner of the Iowa Corn Indy 250.

Iowa elected officials applauded the new speedway and showed their support for renewable fuels at the event. Pictured are Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Bill Northey, Lt. Gov. Patty Judge, Gov. Chet Culver, Sens. Tom Harkin and Chuck Grassley and Iowa Speedway General Manager Craig Armstrong.

Sens. Harkin and Grassley, Lt. Gov. Judge, and Secretary of Agriculture Northey get a look at the track shortly before the race.

Harkin and Grassley hopped in this Honda Accord hybrid vehicle with Judge (and a professional driver). They had the honor of taking a fast lap around the track.

The Honda speeds around the track at about 100 miles per hour, giving the senators and lieutenant governor a little bit of an idea of what its like to race around the Iowa Speedway.

The guys from Orange County Choppers, known for the TV show American Chopper, show off their custom E-85 motorcycle that was made especially for the Iowa Corn Indy 250.
American Chopper star Paul Teutul Sr. heads out on the E-85 chopper for a ride.

The bill requires that the U.S. produce 36 billion gallons of fuel per year from renewable sources by 2022. It would also require that 15 billion gallons of ethanol be made from corn by 2015, doubling the current standard.
The success of the bill is a defeat for many national livestock organizations, which fought against the fuel standard because of fears of increased feed costs that could result from corn prices driven higher by ethanol production.

As reported last week by Iowa Independent, livestock groups like the National Pork Producers Association and the National Cattlemen's Beef Association were urging changes to the proposed renewable fuels standard. Food processors like Coca-Cola — which uses corn-derived sweeteners — and cereal manufacturers also opposed the standard because of the rising cost of corn.

At that time Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley issued a scolding statement to the groups opposed to the standard, telling them to "not be selfish." The Republican urged patience and said the potential for ethanol production will be significant once the cellulosic technologies are up and running, which will relieve pressure on corn prices paid by livestock producers.

In a telephone interview today with Iowa Independent, Iowa Pork Producers Association President-elect Dave Moody said that livestock farmers remain concerned about the push for any more ethanol derived from corn. "There is a concern about the usage of corn and the physical availability of corn," said Moody. "If we end up with anything at all short of a good crop anywhere, with the way the ethanol industry has been growing, that is the concern."

"The problem is probably not going to happen in Iowa," Moody said, "but there are certainly producers in other parts of the nation where there's not quite as abundant a supply of corn and that is something pork producers are definitely concerned about." He said that the renewable fuels standard in the Senate bill will rely on the success of new ways to make ethanol from sources other than corn.

Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa on Friday issued a statement applauding the success of the bill. Harkin highlighted the fact that the bill pushes for new renewable fuels technologies like making ethanol from products other than corn. "We are on the cusp of a bioenergy revolution in this country and this bill realizes that by putting a heavy emphasis on biofuels from cellulosic feedstocks," said Harkin. "That provision is critical for the economies of Iowa and the Midwest where most of our renewable fuels are produced. Today that comes from corn and soybeans, but in the future we'll still be leaders with biofuels coming from biomass in southern Iowa as well as corn and corn stover from northern Iowa."

Harkin also noted that the Senate bill raises automotive efficiency standards for the first time since the 1980s, and includes provisions to improve the energy efficiency of lighting, appliances and buildings.

The Senate bill now awaits action from the U.S. House.

The race, which will be held at the new Iowa Speedway in Newton, will be broadcast live on ABC starting at noon.

Lead sponsors for the event are the Iowa Corn Promotion Board and the Iowa Corn Growers Association, which are highlighting the fact that Indy Racing League cars are fueled by 100 percent ethanol.

And that's not just here at the Iowa Corn Indy 250, but in all Indy Racing League events including the granddaddy of them all — the Indianapolis 500.

Legendary race car driver A.J. Foyt will be a special guest. Foyt was inducted into the International Motorsports Hall of Fame in 2000.

The series of publications will provide overviews of biomass crop soil and site adaptation, life cycle and growth, fertility, yield, harvest considerations, and pest and disease management.

The first two entries cover switchgrass and Miscanthus, plant species that are being studied for possible uses as biomass crops.

Lance Gibson, associate professor of agronomy and a lead author of the fact sheets, said in a press release that switchgrass is currently used as a forage crop or as ground cover to control erosion, "but it can also be burned to generate electricity or fermented into biofuel."
"Miscanthus biomass research in the United States is in its early stages, but has received widespread attention in Europe where it is used for combustion in power plants," Gibson said. "We also are looking into its potential for conversion to ethanol."

The publications are available on the internet at http://www.agron.iastate.edu/research/biorenewables.aspx.
Switchgrass and Miscanthus field trials are currently under way at ISU Research and Demonstration Farms.