The corn market is crazy. I don’t know how anybody whose livelihood depends upon corn prices can possibly have any hair left. This summer, as it went sky-high in the high $7 range, it was amazing to watch. How high would it go? And now, as the harvest begins, it drops off into the low $6s. What gives? No new corn has been planted, and the best guesses on yield are closing in on what the actual yield will be. The USDA stocks report show stocks are substantially lower, but not as low as the trade feared. So the market goes down. Then, there’s talk about fears of a double dip world recession. Oil prices are slacking. The “noncommercial” speculators are sitting out the market all of a sudden. These all are moving targets. How can anybody keep up?

I’m no market analyst, and I’m not a serious market watcher. I’ve never bought or sold a bushel of grain, although being a farmer’s daughter and married to a retired farmer, I have listened to market reports all my life. And I have to add, those markets were not corn. When I was a kid, the corn my dad and brothers raised was mostly fed, so it was the cattle and hog markets that were watched. When I married the farm, er, farmer, it was all about wheat and barley, sunflowers and canola. It seems to me that markets are far more volatile now, and there are many more factors influencing those markets now that even just a decade ago.

It took a while writing for Ethanol Producer Magazine before I could retain enough to actually follow the corn market, and I still am not there on the ethanol market. As journalists, we don’t pretend to be the expert -- we find the experts and do our best to thoroughly and accurately report what they tell us.

Market stories are tricky. Being timely, particularly in print, is challenging. We’re now working on the November issue and our commodity columnists were just writing their articles this week. By the time the issue is mailed, in two or three weeks, the markets may have changed. Even for web news, it can be difficult, with markets as volatile as they are. We focus, instead, on taking what we call the 30,000-foot-view, rather than the on-the-ground, nitty gritty analysis. What does this all mean? What are people saying about the long term impacts?

Answering those sorts of question can be a challenge, too. My colleague Kris Bevill wanted to do a story about what’s happening with cellulosic and advanced biofuel RINs. She had a hard time finding people willing to be interviewed, so her story touches on that conundrum, but mostly talks about the issues surrounding setting the volume mandates in the RFS for advanced and cellulosic biofuels.

Kris also wrote about the latest views on feedstock logistics for cellulosic ethanol. A commercial plant is going to require mountains of stover or other baled feedstocks. Many are concerned about how getting that all in motion is going to work and what it will cost, which Kris reports on in her article.

Associate Editor Holly Jessen, contributed an interesting article taking a different look at the feedstock issue. She reports on work being done to see if new cover crop ideas would allow more stover to be removed in the Corn Belt, and solve another problem – improving water quality by reducing nutrient leaching during the winter months. Cover crops haven’t caught on because the cost benefit isn’t big enough, but the researchers she talked to are finding interesting results.

 I often think that anti-ethanol sentiments are fed by those who think modern corn farming is destroying the environment. I believe farmers are environmentalists, but they have to be rooted in practicality. They also must make their farming practices pay. Thus, there is a built in conservatism about adopting new farming practices. It will be interesting to see what is finally adopted as the age of biorefining unfolds.