-Submitted photo
Denny Friest visits with members of a trade team visiting his Hardin County farm.

It’s hard to believe in a state that grows more corn than almost any place on earth, but there are still Iowans out there who don’t know all the uses that this “miracle” crop has in today’s world.

The Iowa Corn Growers Association would like to change that and works hard throughout the year to educate the public, grow markets for farmers, and work with state and federal officials to enhance opportunities for corn farmers.

Take a trip through a grocery store and, rather than looking for items produced from corn, try to find some that aren’t.

A typical grocery store stocks some 4,000 items that contain something that started with a kernel of corn, according to the Iowa Growers Association. From cereals, to meat, to edible oils and more — especially if there happens to be a fuel pump in the neighborhood — the uses for corn never seem to end.

But it all starts with communication and advocacy to build those uses based on markets that corn growers can support.

Denny Friest, past president of the Iowa Corn Growers Association, knows the lessons of market importance better than most and is dedicated to working on issues that build productivity and profitability for farmers.

Ethanol continues to be a high priority in the advocacy arena, according to Friest.

“We want to increase funding for the cost-sharing program for ethanol,” he said. “We also want to promote ethanol as a carbon reduction solution. Last year we put in E15 as the standard and that greatly reduces our emissions by putting 15 percent ethanol in our gasoline supply.”

Saving stepped-up basis

Another constant issue that is almost always on the front burner for farmers is taxes, according to Friest.

“That’s always a high priority,” he said. “We want to protect critical tax credits, such as for biofuels and the stepped-up basis.”

Stepped-up basis is critical to help farmers pass on a family farm to the next generation.

It allows the value of an asset to be “stepped up” from its initial value to the current fair market value at the time of the owner’s death.

In November 2021, President Biden proposed eliminating the stepped-up basis to help fund his proposed American Families Plan. For farm families, who hold ag land for decades, they could have faced tremendous capital gains taxes at the time of inheritance. That alone could have forced the sale of many family farms.

“We stepped up and prevented the loss of stepped-up basis, which is very good,” Friest said.

Adding value,

adding markets

For Friest, much of the conversation is always about adding value to the raw product. In his 50 years of farming, he has seen great bounds of growth in this area, but said even more needs to be done for the future.

“Value-added ag is huge,” Friest said. “Twenty-five to 30 percent of everything I grow on my farm — which is corn, soybeans and pork — is all going in to the export market. I’m putting the value-added take on a lot of the variety cuts of meat; the liver, the heart, lips, the lungs, stomach, and all these things are value-added products that we ship overseas to consumers that want them, especially to the Asian market.”

In this way, utilizing and exporting those different cuts is a way of reducing waste and finding increased opportunity to add in profit for farmers.

“High on our agenda right now in Congress is to increase funding for our foreign markets development,” Friest added. “These are programs funded through the Farm Bill that will match our dollars we have from our checkoff dollars to develop markets overseas.”

Pushing the case for corn farmers is particularly important, as members of Congress will no doubt hear from many commodity groups.

“All the commodities compete for these dollars,” he said. “Almonds, blueberries, cranberries, apples, oranges, everybody competes for these dollars,” Friest explained. “There’s only a limited amount of money, and with inflation it’s not keeping up with those limited dollars. We’d like to see that little money raised going in to the Farm Bill, so that’s a really high priority for us on the national level.”

Environmental efforts

Yet another priority in the year ahead for the Iowa Corn Growers Association will be conservation and water quality issues. Voluntary efforts are the key here, he said, and are always the most successful in the long run.

“We’ve spent 10 years working with farmers and different agencies, encouraging farmers to adopt policies like strip-till, no-till, cover crops, and we’re expanding on that,” Friest said.

“We’ve done tremendous things on a volunteer basis and we want to continue doing that. We are happy to get farmers onboard with programs through the NRCS or county FSA offices to help us utilize these techniques.”

Family farmers, who live on the land and seek to pass that land down to the next generation, are excellent stewards of the soil and Friest took note of the success of voluntary efforts in recent years.

“We can do a good job of keeping our nitrogen on the field and out of the water,” he said.

After all, farmers are paying very good money to put those inputs on the ground and do not want to see them wasted.

“We’ve definitely had an interesting year,” he said. “We had good prices on our grain, but our input prices are tremendous. We are actually making some inroads with the fertilizer companies. We have sat at the table and expressed our concern that we are their customers. They first made the statement that we as farmers were not the customer, that our suppliers were their customers. But we are the customers who buy that fertilizer. We at least have them at the table … and we have heard some rumors on improvement on price.”

Joint efforts

with livestock producers

Finally, among the issues that continue to be a priority is support for the livestock industry. Feeding livestock is perhaps the oldest value-added use of corn, and continues to be of great importance for corn producers.

“The livestock industry is tremendous for the corn that we grow,” Friest said. “It’s a huge market. We work all the time with livestock groups. What’s good for them is good for us. In the production and research side of things, we develop policies that are good for both of us in that as well.”