03/10/2025 No Hype for the Pipe in South Dakota

On the Grains
Ethanol received some difficult news at the end of last week. First, the Governor of South Dakota, Larry Rhoden, signed the bill banning eminent domain use for the carbon pipeline. I sit on both sides of the fence on this one, as a corn farmer and a landowner. I strongly support the idea that the public would benefit from a pipeline. I also do not tell somebody else how to manage their land. The sins of past pipeline projects are coming back to haunt this project. I am not implying that Summit Carbon was guilty of these sins, as most of them were in the late 1990s and early 2000s, where they said they would go 4 feet deep in Northeast Iowa, and a fair chunk ended up being 18-24 inches, ruining tile along the way. Ethanol has made multimillionaires out of just about anybody who owned ground and single-handedly saved countless rural towns by providing high-paying jobs, let alone the property taxes to local schools. As a resident of Minnesota getting Twin Cities ideals crammed down my throat, I can appreciate the autonomy of South Dakota yet feel like we may be hitching our horse to the wrong wagon. I know that billionaires rarely give up on an investment, and I imagine they have a contingency plan. All it would take to get farmers to sign up in Minnesota is Governor Walt’s opposing it, and it would be a flood of willing landowners to sign up. If I were involved in this project, that is where I’d start. Governor Walt comments that nothing out there but cows and rocks should be like shooting fish out of a barrel.