The Ethanol Kingpin of Iowa

Plus, he had to have learned a few key lessons.

Make sure you get in business with people who know the local land setup.

Get to know the people and the place a bit before you commit.

And find local ag partners and managers, not just local spokespeople.

Maybe don't be a pioneer.

Go where others have gone before.

[instrumental music plays] You know, ADM, Cargo, Bunge, all the US companies have done business, as you know, in Brazil for a long time.

But the idea of going into a foreign market and modernizing it, that was still very much part of Bruce's game plan for Brazil.

This is Bruce on the Land Ledger podcast in 2024.

We believe Brazil was gonna raise a significant amount of second-crop corn.

At the time, it was smaller corn crop in 2011, and second crop hadn't caught on.

It was sunflowers and cotton.

This term he uses, second-crop corn, it's how people in the corn ethanol business talk about sustainability in Brazil.

If you plant corn as the second crop after soybeans, for example, then on paper at least, it's responsible for fewer environmental impacts.

It's something corn ethanol guys need to do to qualify for the lucrative sustainable aviation fuel market.

But it was clear to me that Mato Grosso would outpace the US in not only soybean production like they have.

They will produce more second-crop corn in the future than Minnesota and, and soon to be than Iowa.

So we believed it was a good spot to build a corn ethanol plant, so we built Brazil's first modern corn ethanol plant.

This time, there were no student protests or bad press to stop them.

Meanwhile, back in Iowa, with a steady supply of cheap Brazilian corn and ethanol, Rastetter set about expanding his business once again into a new added-value product, carbon.

You could almost say carbon sequestration would be cycle four now.

Cory was cutting out there a little bit, but he said, "You could almost say carbon sequestration would be cycle four now." Carbon sequestration is checking a lot of boxes for corn ethanol guys.

Corn ethanol has too high a carbon footprint to qualify as sustainable aviation fuel.

But if you attach a carbon capture and storage project to an ethanol refinery, you can remove that problem and create not just sustainable jet fuel, but also a whole new revenue stream.

That captured carbon can be sold either as a carbon credit to a company looking to offset its emissions, or to an oil company looking to inject it underground to help extract more oil.