There’s a sound that corn makes when it’s drying properly. Not the roar of a propane burner forcing 200 degree air through a column of wet grain. That’s not drying. That’s cooking. The sound corn makes when it’s drying properly is quieter than that. It’s the sound of wind. Cool air moving through a crib of ear corn.

 The breeze threading between the ears. The way water threads through gravel, touching every kernel, carrying moisture away, one molecule at a time. If you stand beside a corn crib on a November afternoon with a 10 mph wind, you can hear it. A low, steady whisper that sounds like the building is breathing, which in a way it is.

 The crib is breathing the moisture out of the corn the way lungs breathe water out of the body slowly, gently without burning anything. Nobody listens to that sound anymore. And nobody has corn cribs anymore. The corn crib, the slatted wooden building that stored and dried ear corn using nothing but natural airflow, was the standard grain storage structure on every farm in the Midwest for 150 years.

Then in the 1970s and 80s, the grain industry switched to machine drying propane fired column dryers that could take corn from 25% moisture to 15% in 4 hours. Metal grain bins with heated arration floors that could dry 10,000 bushels in two days. The machine dryers were fast. The corn cribs were slow. Speed one.

 The cribs were torn down, burned, or left to collapse, replaced by silver grain bins and roaring propane burners that consumed $8,000 to $15,000 of fuel per season to do what the wind had been doing for free since the first farmer shelled his first ear. In Faget County, Iowa, the northeast corner of the state, hilly ground, cold winters, the kind of country where the corn comes off wet and stays wet unless somebody does something about it.

 The transition from cribs to dryers happened between 1975 and 1995. In 1975, approximately 60% of the farms in the county still used corn cribs for at least a portion of their crop. By 1985, the number was 20%. By 1995, it was less than 5%. maybe a dozen farms out of 300 that still had functional corn cribs and still use them as their primary drying method. By 2010, the number was one.

 The farm belonged to a man named Walter Dietrich. He was 72 years old. He farmed 280 acres outside of Westgate. And he had six corn cribs. Six slatted wooden buildings, each one 40 ft long and 8 ft wide, arranged in two rows of three behind his barn. They filled every October with ear corn that dried through the winter on nothing but Iowa wind.

 The six cribs held approximately 12,000 bushels of ear corn. his entire crop, minus what he sold off the combine as high moisture corn to the feed lot south of town. The cribs had been built by Walter’s father, Helmet, in 1952 using white oak from the timber on the property. The slats were spaced 3/4 of an inch apart, wide enough for air to move freely through the corn, narrow enough to keep the ears from falling through.

 The roofs were steep pitched galvanized steel to shed snow. The floors were raised 18 in off the ground on stone peers to prevent ground moisture from wicking up into the corn. Each crib was a drying machine. A machine that required no fuel, no electricity, no moving parts, and in no maintenance beyond replacing a slat or a roofing nail every few years.

 Walter’s neighbors had abandoned their cribs decades ago. The cribs had been replaced by grain bins, 18 ft and 24 ft steel cylinders with perforated floors, fans, and propane heaters that could dry shelled corn at rates of 500 to 1,000 bushels per hour. The bins were impressive. They gleamed in the sun. They hummed with the sound of fans and burners.

 They represented modernity and efficiency and the forward march of agriculture from primitive to professional. The cribs were none of those things. The cribs were wooden, old, slatted, filled with ear corn that had to be shoveled by hand, and they dried at a rate of approximately zero bushels per hour because the drying wasn’t measurable in hours. It was measurable in weeks.

 The year corn in a crib dried from 25% moisture to 15% over the course of November through February. Four months of passive drying, the wind doing the work, the cold air carrying the moisture, the corn slowly, imperceptibly reaching storage condition without a single BTU of purchased energy. The co-op math on Walter’s cribs was merciless.

Walter Dietrich is still crib and ear corn. He shovels ears into a wooden building and waits four months for the wind to dry them. The rest of us dry shelled corn in 4 hours with a column dryer and have it sold by Thanksgiving. His corn is tied up all winter in those cribs, while ours is sold in October at the harvest price.

 He doesn’t sell until March. He misses the harvest basis every year. The basis argument was the strongest one. Morbasis is the difference between the local cash price and the futures price. The premium or discount that the local elevator applies based on supply and demand. At harvest, when every farmer is selling, the basis is wide.

The elevator discounts the price because they’re flooded with grain. In March, when the harvest rushes over and the elevator needs grain to fill contracts, the basis narrows. The difference could be 15 cents to 30 cents per bushel, significant on 12,000 bushels. Walter’s neighbors saw the wide harvest basis as a cost Walter was avoiding by not selling at harvest.

Walter saw the narrow march basis as a premium he was capturing by waiting. The argument went back and forth at the co-op for 20 years, and neither side ever won because both sides were measuring different things. And the neighbors measured speed, how fast the corn was dry and sold. Walter measured cost, how much it cost to get the corn dry. Their metrics were incompatible.

They were both right. They were both wrong. They would never agree. The grain dryer dealer in Fet County was a man named Terry Feifer who sold Brock and Sucup grain handling equipment out of a shop in oil wine. Terry sold bins, dryers, fans, augers, the complete grain handling system that had replaced the corn crib on every farm in the county except Walters.

 Terry’s sales pitch was polished and well rehearsed. A modern grain handling system pays for itself in 3 to 5 years through reduced labor, faster turnaround, and the ability to sell at harvest when the price is posted instead of waiting four months and gambling on the spring market. Terry had pitched Walter directly in 1998, 2003, and 2008.

Each time Walter had listened politely, asked about the propane consumption, calculated the annual fuel cost in his head, and declined. “Your drier burns 1.5 gallons of propane per bushel point of moisture removed,” Walter told Terry in 2008. “My corn comes off the field at 24%. Storage is 15%. That’s nine points to remove. 1.

5 gallons times 9 points times 12,000 bushels is $162,000 gallons of propane per season. At [snorts] $180 per gallon, that’s $291,600. No, wait. Walter stopped. He’d slipped a decimal. The co-op men laughed. Walter recalculated. 1.5 gallons per point per 100 bushels. So 1.5 * 9 * 120 is $1,620 gallons at $180. That’s $2,916 per year in propane.

That’s right, Terry said. About $3,000 in propane. My cribs cost zero in propane, zero in electricity, zero in fan motors, zero in burner maintenance. The wind is free, the cold is free, November is free. My drying cost is the labor to fill the cribs, about 40 hours at harvest, and the labor to shell the corn in March.

 About 40 hours, 80 hours of my time. At any reasonable labor rate, my drying cost is half of yours. And I don’t need to buy a propane tank, a burner, a fan, or a bin. You need four months. I have four months. November, December, January, February. They happen every year. They’ve been happening since before propane existed.

 They’re going to keep happening after the propane runs out. After the propane runs out. Terry remembered that line and he remembered it because it struck him as absurd. Propane wasn’t going to run out. Propane was abundant, domestic, available at every LP dealer in Iowa. The idea that propane would run out was the kind of thing a man says when he’s defending a position he can’t defend with facts, so he retreats to hypotheticals.

Terry filed it away as a Walterism, the quaint philosophy of a man who dried corn with wind because he was too stubborn to buy a burner. Then the winter of 2013 to 2014 arrived and the propane ran out. Now, let me tell you about the propane crisis because what happened in Iowa in the winter of 2013 to 2014 was not a hypothetical.

It was a catastrophe that exposed the fragility of an entire grain drying infrastructure built on a single fuel source that nobody thought could disappear. The crisis began with the 2013 corn harvest. And the harvest was late. A wetfall had delayed combining across the Midwest by 2 to 3 weeks. The corn came off the field wetter than normal.

 22 to 28% moisture in northeastern Iowa compared to the typical 18 to 22. Wetter corn meant more drying. More drying meant more propane. The propane demand for grain drying in the fall of 2013 was approximately 40% above normal across the upper Midwest. At the same time, the propane supply was constrained.

 A bumper crop of corn and soybeans in 2013 meant that propane was being consumed for grain, drying in massive quantities across 12 states simultaneously. The pipeline and rail infrastructure that delivered propane from the Gulf Coast refineries to the Midwest couldn’t handle the surge. Propane terminals ran dry. Deliveries were delayed by days, then weeks. The price, which had been $1.

80 per gallon in September, climbed to $2.50 in October, $3.50 in November, and by December had reached $5 per gallon in some parts of Iowa, nearly triple the normal price. And then the polar vortex hit. The winter of 2013 to 2014 was the coldest in Iowa in 20 years. January temperatures averaged 8° below normal. February was worse.

 The cold increased home heating demand for propane at the same time that the grain drying demand was still running hot from the late harvest. The propane infrastructure already strained by the drying surge broke under the combined load of drying and heating. The governor of Iowa declared a state of emergency for propane on January 12th, 2014.

The emergency declaration allowed propane trucks to bypass weight limits and hours of service rules to expedite deliveries. But it wasn’t enough. Propane was allocated. Dealers rationed. Farmers who had been drying corn since October, who had consumed their fall propane allocation and needed more, were told the supply wasn’t available.

 Not at any price. In FET County, the crisis was acute. The county had approximately 180 propane fired grain dryers. Each drier consumed between 1,500 and 5,000 gallons of propane per season, depending on the size of the operation and the moisture of the corn. Total county demand for grain drying propane in the fall of 2013 was estimated at 600,000 gallons.

 The county’s LP dealers had contracted for 450,000 gallons, 75% of the demand based on normalyear estimates that hadn’t been updated for the wet harvest. The shortfall was 150,000 gallons. 150,000 gallons of propane that didn’t exist in the county that couldn’t be delivered to the county and was needed to dry approximately 800,000 bushels of corn that was sitting in bins at 20 to 24% moisture.

 Too wet to store, too wet to sell, and too wet to ignore. Wet corn in a bin does one thing. It spoils. At 20% moisture and 40°, microbial activity generates heat. The heat creates hot spots zones in the grain mass where the temperature rises, the moisture condenses, and the corn begins to ferment. Fermented corn is ruined corn. The kernels turn dark, the grain smells sour, the test weight drops below the minimum for delivery, and the elevator rejects it.

 At 24% moisture and the temperatures that can develop in an unventilated hot spot, corn can spoil in as little as two weeks. Farmers across Fyet County were watching their corn spoil, and they had bins full of wet corn and empty propane tanks. The dealers were rationing. The price was $5 per gallon if you could get it, which most couldn’t.

 The math that had always worked, harvest wet, dry with propane, sell dry, had broken because one variable in the equation, the propane had vanished. Walter Dietrich’s corn was dry. Not propane dry, wind dry. The corn that Walter had picked as ear corn in October and filled into his six cribs was drying the way it always dried. The November wind moving through the slats, the cold air carrying the moisture, the years losing approximately 1% of moisture per week as the winter deepened.

 By January, when the propane crisis was at its worst, Walter’s corn was at approximately 17%. Down from 24 at harvest, on track to reach 15 by the end of February. The corn was shrinking, the kernels tightening, the ears losing weight as the water left. The cribs were breathing, the corn was drying. No propane, no electricity, no crisis.

The first neighbor came in early January. Owen Halverson, who farmed 600 acres north of Walter, had 8,000 bushels of corn at 22% moisture in two bins and an empty propane tank. His dealer couldn’t deliver until February. His corn was heating. The thermometer cable in the bin showed 58° at the center, 20° above the ambient temperature, rising 2° per day.

At that rate, he had two weeks before the hot spot became a spoilage zone and the corn was ruined. Owen drove to Walter’s farm. He parked beside the cribs, the six wooden buildings that the county had been laughing at for 20 years. The cribs were full when a earn visible through the slats, the ears stacked randomly, air moving between them, the low whisper of wind through grain.

 Owen had walked past these cribs a hundred times and never stopped to look at them. They were Walter’s eccentricity, Walter’s museum pieces, Walter’s refusal to modernize. Now Owen was looking at them the way a thirsty man looks at a well. Walder. Owen, my corn is heating. I’m at 22% in the bin. No propane. And the dealer says February.

 I’ve got two weeks before I lose 8,000 bushels. I know everybody’s in the same spot. Can I Owen stopped. The question was awkward. What he wanted to ask was something no farmer in Faget County had asked another farmer in 30 years. Can I use your corn cribs? Can I move some corn into your cribs? Shell it out of the bin. Rear it. No. And that doesn’t work.

 Owen caught himself. You can’t turn shelled corn back into ear corn. The crib method required ear corn. Corn picked on the ear, stored with the cob attached. The cob providing the air space between the kernels that allowed the wind to move through the mass. Shelled corn in a crib would pack too tight for air movement.

 The slats would let the loose kernels fall through. The crib was designed for ears, not kernels. Owen’s corn was already shelled. The crib couldn’t help. Walter saw the realization cross Owen’s face, the understanding that the corn crib solution was only available to farmers who had used corn cribs in the first place. The cribs weren’t a backup for the propane system.

 They were an alternative to it. And the alternative was only available to the one man who’d never left it. I can’t put your corn in my cribs, Walter said. But I can sell you some of mine. I’ve got about 2,000 bushels. That’s down to 16%. Dry enough to deliver. If you need corn to sell against your contracts, I can let you have 2,000 bushels at market plus a dollar for my trouble.

 Owen looked at Walder. Market plus a dollar. In a county where wet corn was selling at discounts of 40 cents to 60 cents per bushel because the elevators were overwhelmed with moisture ducks, Walter’s dry corn, crib dried, wind dried, free dried, was worth market plus a dollar because it was the only dry corn available.

The premium wasn’t a markup. It was the market recognizing what wind and time had done that propane couldn’t. I’ll take it, Owen said. Walter sold Owen 2,000 bushels. He sold another 1,500 to a second neighbor the following week. They by the end of January, Walter had sold 6,000 of his 12,000 bushels, half his crop at market plus a dollar, to six farmers who needed dry corn to fill contracts that their wet, undried, propane stranded corn couldn’t fulfill.

Walter’s premium on 6,000 bushels at $1 above market, $6,000. The total drying cost of that corn, $0. The wind had dried it. Walter had stored it. The crisis had priced it. $6,000 in premium on corn that cost nothing to dry. In a normal year, Walter’s crib dried corn sold at the same price as everyone else’s propane dried corn.

 No premium, no discount. The moisture was 15% either way, and the elevator didn’t care how it got there. In 2014, the method of drying determined the value because the method determined the availability. Propane dried corn wasn’t available because propane wasn’t available. Wind dried corn was available because wind was available.

 The market paid the difference. Now, let me tell you about Terry Feifer. Because the grain dryer dealer who’d been selling propane systems for 25 years drove to Walter’s farm on a Saturday morning in February [snorts] and stood between the corn cribs with his hands in his pockets and said something that the co-op would repeat for years.

Terry had been hammered by the crisis. His customers were calling not to buy equipment but to complain. The dryers he’d sold them needed propane. The propane wasn’t there. The corn was spoiling. 14 farmers in the county had reported spoilage losses. Corn that went from wet to ruined in the bins because the propane ran out before the drying was done.

 The total estimated spoilage loss in Fet County, approximately 120,000 bushels, $480,000 of corn destroyed because the infrastructure that was supposed to dry it had failed. Terry parked at Walter’s farm. He walked between the cribs, the six wooden buildings, the slats, the ear corn visible inside, the breeze moving through the gaps with that low whisper that Walter heard every November and that Terry had never listened to.

 He stood between crib number three and crib number four and looked at the ears through the slats. They were pale yellow, dry, the kernels tight on the cob, the moisture gone, dried by nothing, dried by everything, by wind and cold and time and the patience to let November do what a propane burner does in 4 hours.

 Only slower and free and without a supply chain that can break. Now, Walter walked out of the barn and found Terry standing between the cribs. Terry. Walter. Terry didn’t say anything for a while. He touched the slats of crib number three. White oak helmets work from 1952. The wood gray with age but sound. The grain tight, the slat still spaced at 3/4 of an inch. after 62 years.

 I sell dryers, Terry said. Propane dryers. I’ve sold about 200 of them in this county over 25 years. Every one of them is useless without propane. Every one of them is sitting cold right now because the propane isn’t there. And your corn is dry because the wind is always there. The wind is always there. Walter agreed.

You told me something in 2008. You said they’re going to keep happening after the propane runs out. I thought you were being dramatic. Propane doesn’t run out. Except it did. It didn’t run out. It ran short. That’s worse than running out because running out is permanent and you adjust. Running short is temporary and you panic.

 Running short means the supply comes back eventually and everyone forgets it was ever gone and nobody changes anything. The propane will come back in the spring. The price will drop. Every farmer in this county will fill his tanks and fire up his dryer next October and forget that this winter ever happened. And the next time the propane runs short, and it will because the infrastructure hasn’t changed and the demand keeps growing, they’ll be in the same spot with wet corn and empty tanks and no alternative.

And you’ll be here with your cribs. I’ll be here with my cribs. The wind will be here. November will be here. And the only things that won’t be here are the things that depend on a truck showing up with a fuel that somebody else controls. Terry stood between the cribs for a long time. He was 61 years old.

 He’d built a business on propane drying. The business model assumed that propane would always be available, always be affordable, always be delivered on time. The winter of 2014 had broken every one of those assumptions simultaneously. The business model had one point of failure. The fuel. And the fuel had failed. I need to ask you something, Terry said.

And I want you to know I’m asking seriously. Not as a salesman, as a neighbor. Go ahead. If a farmer wanted to build corn cribs today when new ones, modern materials, the same basic design as yours, what would it cost? Walter looked at his cribs. Six buildings, each 40 ft long and 8 ft wide, holding approximately 2,000 bushels of ear corn each, built by Helmet in 1952 from white oak and galvanized steel roofing.

Total cost in 1952, approximately $1,800 for all six materials only, helmets labor was free. In today’s money, with lumber prices where they are, you could build a crib for about $3,000 to $4,000 in materials. Six cribs for 12,000 bushels, about $22,000. A comparable propane drying system like mounted bin, dryer, fan, propane tank, costs about $65,000 installed and burns $3,000 of propane per year.

 [snorts] The cribs cost a third of the bin system and burn nothing per year. In 10 years, the bin system has cost $95,000. The equipment plus fuel, the cribs have cost $22,000. The construction plus nothing. Horde, the difference is $73,000 over 10 years. $73,000. $73,000 that stays on the farm instead of going to the propane dealer and the cribs don’t run short in January.

Terry thought about that $73,000 over 10 years. His propane dryer customers were spending $73,000 more than they needed to per farm per decade to do what the wind did for free. On 180 farms in the county, the collective excess spending was approximately $13 million per decade. $13 million of propane burned to do what November could do for nothing if anyone had the patience to let November work.

The patience is the problem, Terry said as if reading Walter’s mind. Nobody has four months. Everybody wants dry corn in October. Nobody wants to wait until March. Everybody wants October because everybody’s in debt. The bank note is due in November. The operating loan is due at harvest.

 The farmer needs cash in October, which means he needs dry corn in October, which means he needs propane in October. The propane dryer isn’t a technology choice. It’s a debt choice. The farmer who owes money can’t wait for the wind. The farmer who doesn’t owe money can. You don’t owe money. I haven’t owed money since 1988. I paid the farm off the year my father died.

I’ve been debtree for 26 years. Debtree means I don’t need October corn prices. I can wait for March prices. March prices are usually better anyway. The harvest glut is over. The basis narrows and the corn I sell in March brings 15 cents to 30 cents more per bushel than the corn my neighbors sold in October.

The weight isn’t a penalty. The weight is a premium. I get paid more for waiting and I pay nothing for drying while I wait. Terry drove home. He didn’t come back to sell Walter a dryer. He didn’t mention the cribs at the co-op, but when someone at the co-op mentioned the propane crisis, and it was mentioned every Saturday through March, Terry went quiet and looked at his coffee.

 The way men go quiet when they’re recalculating something they thought they’d figured out years ago. Now, let me tell you about what happened after the crisis. Because the propane came back in the spring of 2014, exactly the way Walter predicted. The price dropped, the tanks refilled, the trucks rolled, and every farmer in Fyet County prepared for the next harvest as if the winter of 2014 had never happened. almost every farmer.

Then three of the six neighbors who’d bought Walter’s dry corn during the crisis came to his farm in the summer of 2014 and asked about building corn cribs. not as their primary drying method. None of them were ready to give up their propane systems entirely, as a backup, as a hedge, as the thing they’d have on the farm when the propane didn’t come.

The way Walter’s father had built the cribs, as the thing the farm would have when nothing else existed. Walter helped them. He drew plans, pencil on graph paper, the same way Helmet had drawn the original plans in 1952. He specified materials, treated lumber for the sills, construction grade hardwood for the slats, galvanized steel for the roofing.

 He showed them the slat spacing 3/4 of an inch, the width that allows air to move without letting ears fall through. Then he showed them the floor height, 18 in on stone peers, the minimum to prevent ground moisture from wicking into the corn. He showed them the orientation, long axis perpendicular to the prevailing wind, so the breeze hits the broad side of the crib and pushes through the maximum cross-section of grain.

 Two of the three farmers built cribs that summer. Small ones, single cribs, 30 feet long, holding about 1,200 bushels each. Enough to dry a portion of their crop without propane. Not enough to replace the propane system, but enough to have an alternative when the alternative was needed. The third farmer planned to build, but got busy with harvest and never did.

He was the one who in the winter of 2019 when when propane prices spiked again, not as severely as 2014, but enough to remind everyone wished he’d built when he had the chance. Z Walter’s crib stand, six buildings, 62 years old now. The white oak gray but solid. The roofing patched twice. The stone peers unchanged since helmet set them in 1952.

The cribs have dried approximately 720,000 bushels of ear corn over their lifetime. 12,000 bushels per year for 60 years. Total propane consumed in drying those 720,000 bushels. zero total propane that would have been consumed in a drier system approximately 97,200 gallons over 60 years at an average price of $150 per gallon over the period.

Approximately $146,000 in fuel savings. That’s the number that the co-op math never included. the cost of the fuel that the wind replaced. $146,000 of propane that Walter’s farm never burned, never bought, never depended on, and never ran short of. Let me tell you about how this ends. Walter Dietrich is 82 years old.

 His son, McCrae, manages the 280 acres. Craig fills the cribs every October the way Walter fills them and helmet filled them. Ear corn picked with a two row picker augured into the cribs through a door at the top. The ears tumbling randomly. The air spaces forming naturally. The November wind beginning its work.

 The day the last ear goes in. Craig also has a grain bin with a propane dryer. He bought it in 2016. a small system, 5,000 bushel bin with a batch dryer for the corn he wants to sell at harvest. The bin dries the October corn. The cribs dry the rest. Craig uses both systems, the fast and the slow, the modern and the old, the propane and the wind.

 He has what his father had and what his father’s neighbors didn’t. a backup, an alternative, the thing that works when the other thing stops working. Walter told Craig the same thing Helmet told Walter. The wind is free and the wind is always there. Everything else costs money and everything else can run out. Build your operation on the thing that’s free and always there.

 And use the other things when they’re available. That way, you’re never stuck. You’re never waiting for a truck. You’re never watching your corn spoil because a pipeline in Texas froze or refinery in Louisiana shut down or a governor had to declare an emergency because the fuel ran short. The farmall 56 oh that Walter used for picking ear corn sits in the barn beside the two row picker that feeds the cribs.

Craig uses a newer tractor, but keeps the farm all maintained. The tractor that fed the cribs for 40 years. The machine that belongs to the system the way a pitcher belongs to a team. The farm all picks. Hey, the cribs dry, the wind blows, the corn comes out dry in March and sells at the spring premium. And the whole system costs nothing except the 80 hours of labor and the patience to let November do the work.

The co-op doesn’t laugh about the cribs anymore. The men at the counter remember 2014. The empty tanks, the $5 propane, the 120,000 bushels that spoiled because the fuel wasn’t there. They remember Walter selling dry corn at market plus a dollar while their corn heated in bins. They couldn’t run. They remember the sound of the wind through the slats.

 The sound most of them hadn’t heard since their grandfather’s farms. The sound of corn drying for free. Some of them have built cribs. Not many. The debt structure of modern farming still demands October cash and October cash demands propane drying. But some of them the ones who remember 2014 the way Walter’s father remembered the winters before propane existed have built the backup.

 The wooden building with the slats, the ears stacked inside, the wind threading through. The propane ran short in 2014. The wind didn’t. That’s the whole story. Subscribe to The Average Farmer for more. We’ll see you in the next