Iowa farmers see benefits to their fields from providing corn stover for ethanol

In Iowa, some farmers are finding that supplying half of their corn stover for cellulosic ethanol production like to the DuPont plant in the town of Nevada has improved farming conditions and had a positive impact on yields. For farmers who grow back-to-back corn, there’s a lot of leftover biomass in the fields that require a lot of expensive machinery to deal with that can later be a negative for soil health due to the deep ripping of the fields to break down the stover. But having taken off half of the stover allows for field cultivation in the spring that then is showing good yield results.