LANSING, Mich. – Grain elevators in Michigan are having problems with shipments of corn being docked on pricing or rejected because of high levels of a toxin derived from a fungus that can make livestock sick that eat it.

Vomitoxin, with levels as high as 50 parts per million, are turning up in some of the corn, particularly on the east side of the state.

According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, recommended levels of vomitoxin should not exceed 10 ppm in grains and grain by-products for chickens and cattle. Levels should not be above 5 ppm for swine, which are more prone to becoming sick from ingesting VOM-tainted corn.

The symptoms in farm animals include lack of appetite and slower weight gain.

Infected corn is nothing new but corn with such high levels of VOM and the amount of it containing lower but still unacceptable amounts in Michigan is definitely turning heads.

“It is a historically bad year for it,” said Chris Betz, a risk manager for the privately owned Michigan Agricultural Commodities (MAC). MAC, which is headquartered in Lansing, is the largest handler of grain in Michigan with elevators across much of the state.

A wet growing season – especially during a cool late summer and early fall – are blamed for what could be the highest amount of VOM-infected corn in the state in decades.

Betz said the amount of corn with elevated levels of vomitoxin is not quite as high at MAC elevators further north and drops even more to the west.

“As a general rule of thumb, it gets worse as you go from west to east,” he said.

Betz said buyers are taking roughly 10 cents a bushel off the price for some of the shipments of corn with minimal amounts of the toxin.

Corn with higher, but still acceptable levels of VOM are seeing larger price cuts while some buyers are rejecting shipments exceeding the recommended amount.

Betz said the standard price for corn is about $4 a bushel.

A majority of their rejected shipments have been from ethanol plants, who rely on the sale of distiller’s grains used as feed by farmers to help with their profit margins. The amount of the livestock-sickening toxin multiplies by percentage in distiller’s grains, a by-product of corn fermented into ethanol. “It’s more concentrated,” he said.

Betz said rejected corn is taken back to the elevators and blended with less toxic corn to reduce the average levels of the toxin in the next shipment.

The goal is to avoid more shipments from being rejected or discounted in price.

Betz said another option is to find more chicken farmers to sell corn to since poultry is not nearly as vulnerable to sickness from ingesting VOM-tainted feed.

“If you have low enough VOM levels, you can still work it into the chicken feed but not swine,” he said.

Betz would not provide any specific monetary details, but said there has been a cost from having more infected corn than usual.

In addition to discounted pricing, operating costs are higher from blending rejected corn with less toxic kernels and storing corn for longer periods to wait for buyers.

“If nothing else, it changes where we’re able to market our corn. So, yeah, it does have a financial impact,” he said.

Betz said he expects MAC to lean on farmers who sold them the corn to recover at least some of their lost revenue. “If we’re discounted on what we sell, we try to discount appropriately the producers as well. It affects everybody down the chain,” he said.

In Indiana, vomitoxin when it develops, is usually more of a problem in the northern part of the state because of the cooler climate where fungus thrives when conditions are wet.

Erin Owens, with Co-Alliance at its facility near Valparaiso, said there have been no problems with infected corn at any of the company’s grain elevators throughout the state this year. “We’ve probably had a trace here and there but, you know, nothing major,” she said.