U.S. Rep. Aaron Schock met Wednesday with officials from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and secured help for the commercialization of pennycress, a crop that could mean $88 million for central Illinois farmers.
“The talks went very well,” said Schock, R-Peoria, following the session in his Washington, D.C., office. “We came out of that meeting with a short-term plan and a long-term plan to get insurance coverage and to move forward with the crop. It was a fruitful meeting.”
He expects to be back in Peoria by Friday and plans to meet with officials from the National Center for Agricultural Utilization Research about pennycress.
Schock said the short-term plan will cover the crop while actuarial issues are resolved before pennycress can be incorporated into the Department of Agriculture’s regular crop insurance program.
He called the potential for pennycress huge both in terms of economics for local farmers and as an alternative fuel source that will reduce America’s dependence on foreign oil.
“The controversy over food vs. fuel … this takes that whole debate away. Pennycress does not compete with food or with farm ground,” Schock said. “It is one of the most efficient forms of biofuel we know of to date. It’s more productive than soybeans.”
Peter Johnsen, former director of the National Center for Agricultural Utilization Research and now a consultant on bio-based products, said pennycress has unprecedented potential as a new crop for the region. He calculates a potential $88 million annually going directly to farmers but said the multiplier effect for the region is much larger.
“Something of this magnitude has not happened. I can’t think of any new crop like this in the past,” Johnsen said, cautioning, however, that the work Schock is doing is critical to full-blown commercial cultivation of pennycress.
Discussions are ongoing between Johnsen and area farmers to secure commitments to plant 2,000 acres of pennycress this fall. With Schock’s efforts to extend crop insurance and loan programs to include pennycress, Johnsen expects cultivation will jump to 20,000 acres in 2010 and 100,000 acres in 2011. A biofuel plant set to go online in Mapleton in 2010 will ultimately need 400,000 acres of pennycress.
Past developments in agriculture have involved replacing a crop such as wheat with soybeans or shifting from livestock to row crops, Johnsen said. In contrast, he added, pennycress does not replace but supplements existing crop production, fitting into a winter planting between corn and soybeans.
Johnsen is working with Sudhir Seth, president and CEO of BioFuels Manufacturers of Illinois, to develop the Mapleton plant. Groundbreaking is projected for this spring.
The facility initially will manufacture fuel using soy oil and animal fat but will shift completely to pennycress when central Illinois farmers have about 400,000 acres in production.
Johnsen said because pennycress avoids thorny issues in the debate over shifting resources from food production to energy crops, its future government support is more secure.
“This crop should be significant to our national energy policy. We are not waiting for a difficult technology breakthrough. We are ready to go,” Johnsen said. “There is no other crop in this position.”
Clare Howard can be reached at 686-3250 or choward@pjstar.com.