WESTERN SKIES - February 26, 2005

*** AG ENERGY ***

ERIC WHITNEY: Agriculture is an energy intensive business. Farmers and ranchers use a lot of fossil fuels to grow their crops, irrigate and move food to market. But lately, more and more farmers are starting to see energy as something they can produce, and not just consume.

Last week about a hundred and fifty agriculture leaders got together in Austin, Texas for the first "Ag Energy Summit." Organizers have set a goal for farmers to produce twenty-five percent of America's energy by the year 2025.

Colorado farmer Mike Bowman, who grows wheat in the northeast corner of the state, is a leading proponent of the "Twenty-five by twenty-five movement." He says the goal of the summit was to get agriculture organized to speak with one voice on its energy potential.

MIKE BOWMAN: There's just too much at stake right now, and the opportunities are too great for agriculture not to be unified as we approach the upcoming debate on the energy bill and the upcoming farm bill.

WHITNEY: Bowman says America's farmers can make our country more secure, shore up trade imbalances, and benefit the environment by setting up wind farms and growing crops that can be converted into fuels like ethanol and biodiesel. And, he says, it'll pull rural America out of what could be a dismal future.

BOWMAN: My family farms in Yuma County are over the Ogalalla aquifer. Now, for fifty years we have created an economy that's built around the withdrawal of water from the Ogalalla; participation in a government-supported commodity programs. We can see on the horizon, the day when that is no longer going to be how we are going to be able to function as a community. And we have to decide what are we going to look like and what is agriculture going to transition into? So that we can become sustainable and bring vitality and some economic activity back to these rural areas.

WHITNEY: Bowman thinks the technology to transform rural America into a viable supplier of renewable energy has now matured and proven itself. He says the next step is to convince large, mainstream agriculture groups that they should get behind this movement.

BOWMAN: Where we used to speak as one voice many years ago, we have now come to the point where we probably have more farm organizations than we do governmental agencies, and we have a lot of diverse directions and agendas that we take. There are factions within agriculture that don't generally work well together. If we can come under one tent, if we can get everybody to agree and have consensus that this is something that we should strive for, we believe we can make it happen.

WHITNEY: Getting farm groups behind energy production isn't the only challenge, Bowman says. Rural electric associations are often slow to embrace renewables, and, he says, there's another barrier to getting future farm energy to market.

BOWMAND: Right now we have a lot of transmission constraints out of eastern Colorado. And not only constraints in the lines that are there, but lack of lines, transmission lines, in some of the areas where the really rich resources exist, whether that be Cheyenne and Kiowa county, and even down into Lamar and Baca. There're just not enough capacity nor availability of lines to harvest the wind resources there. The same is true up in northeastern Colorado in Yuma, Phillips, and Sedgwick county, Kit Carson. Again, some constraints of being able to get the power out of there physically.

WHITNEY: Mike Bowman is a grain farmer from Wray, Colorado, and a steering committee member for the National Ag Energy Working Group.