This fall, the trend in corn seems to be spotlighting varieties purported to contain a high portion of starches to ferment bigger yields of ethanol fuel. Several companies – including, but not limited to, Pioneer Hi-Bred, Monsanto, Syngenta and Mycogen Seeds – are making such lists of their higher-fermenting product lines, some of which also reflect other newly-developed traits.

“The whole idea is to try to identify these seed choices for farmers,” said Russ Sanders, marketing director for biofuel, of Pioneer’s new High Total Fermentable (HTF) designation campaign.

The HTF label applies to particular starch in a kernel of corn, which Sanders said is 72 percent total starch. “Not all starch is created equal,” he explained, adding some is better-structured to more easily ferment for ethanol.

John McKinney, director of the Illinois Crop Improvement Assoc., Inc. (ICIA) Identity Preserved Grain Lab (IPG) in Champaign, explained cornstarch has two components: amylose and amylopectin. In testing for ethanol fermentation, he said high-amylose starch tends to perform poorly, but it cannot yet be concluded that amylose level itself is the reason.

“If you don’t have a lot of starch, you won’t get a very high ethanol yield,” he said, then pointed out high starch in and of itself isn’t always enough to boost production. Other factors matter as well – his focus, however, is on testing, not development.

The nonprofit ICIA, incorporated in 1924, provides official seed certification and related services for universities, for-profit companies and individual farmers. Among “related services” is independent testing, such as it does for Mycogen, a retail arm of DowAgrosciences based in Indianapolis, Ind. ICIA is to operate free of corporate or political influence, while upholding federal and state seed laws.

McKinney said ICIA management decided just this month to expand its paid testing services to allow individuals to request lone-sample testing, including corn fermentability. Formerly, testing required a minimum lot of several samples, even from farmers.

The IPG takes testing for Mycogen and other seed sellers, though McKinney said places like Pioneer and Syngenta conduct most of theirs internally. He said Monsanto is also known to test seeds of companies with whom it licenses, and sells Processor Preferred ethanol-friendly seed.

Typically, McKinney said the range of ethanol production from corn tests is between 2.55-2.9 gallons per bushel (56 pounds of corn with 15 percent moisture). Industry-wide, he has heard higher-fermenting corn is supposed to put out 2-4 percent more ethanol and reported that claim “comes in very close to what we see.”

Iowa-based Pioneer markets about 300 corn seed varieties in North America; of those, the company lists more than 180 as HTF. Of those, 21 are new and include traits from Pioneer’s latest genetic research to produce higher yield through herbicide and insect production, Sanders noted. “Virtually all of these new products carry variations of these production traits” in addition to being HTF, he said.

Mycogen markets mainly to farmers in the Midwest from Kansas to the east coast. This is the first year it has touted its highly fermentable corn hybrids, according to Dave Schumacher, Mycogen grain corn marketing specialist. “If they’re looking at marketing into the ethanol facilities … they may want to consider products that are on this list,” he said.

After three years in business, Walter Wendland, president and CEO of Golden Grain Energy in Mason City, Iowa, said, “We haven’t seen enough improvement to warrant paying a premium for highly-fermentable corn.”

He added, however, that he appreciates seed companies’ efforts to research and continue developing toward a higher-fermenting corn. He also explained it’s a small plant and, as such, it does not separate the 200 loads of corn that come in each day for testing – instead, the company takes random samples, trying to find a correlation. He estimated half to two-thirds of what comes in may be highly-fermentable corn, but is not certain. (A larger company that may do such testing/scanning, POET, could not provide anyone for comment by press time.)

Wendland, a 15-year corn grower himself, proposed that weather may have as much or more to do with fermentability as anything. “It’s a biological process, so it’s very hard to see repeatable results time and time again,” he said of fermentation. “We’re always trying to find what that little thing is we can do differently.”

Traits such as HERCULEX insect protection, Schumacher said – which was developed by Dow and Pioneer – should complement high-fermentation traits by keeping pest damage low and yield high. He does not believe producing more ethanol from corn will have an adverse effect on its byproducts market.

“It wouldn’t have a significant impact on the DDGs (dry distillers grains),” he said.

Sanders estimates one-third of the corn going into a dry-grind facility comes out as DDGs for livestock feed. McKinney said it’s a fact that more ethanol from the same corn means fewer DDGs – anything leftover from making ethanol, including oil, protein, fiber and residual starch – though he could not say how much of a loss. The goal of targeting seed traits is to make corn more valuable, Sanders said. “What is it we can do to increase the positive compositional elements, and what can we do to take out the negative value?” he said of corn genetics research, adding Pioneer is also interested in improving protein and digestible content of corn. A corn kernel only has so much room with which to work. Taking out some fiber in corn skin and on the ear’s tip cap is a common way to create “room” to grow additional desirable content.

Sanders said insect protection is not just about keeping pests off corn. There is also research to suggest insect feeding increases a corn plant’s chances for developing damaging – and dangerous, for animals – mold.