North Dakota Corn Growers Association marks 35 years

MAPELTON, N.D. — Thirty-five years in the past, farmers received collectively to arrange the North Dakota Corn Growers Affiliation. The celebration Monday, Aug. 8, marks the hassle years in the past to lastly get corn growers the market they wanted. They consider that each time they drive by an ethanol plant.

Exterior the Tharaldson Ethanol plant in Casselton, it is just like the Indy 500, with vans filled with corn rolling into the plant and able to dump the 54 million bushels of corn the plant makes use of per 12 months.

To assume this all began 35 years in the past.

“We had been struggling to discover a marketplace for our corn,” mentioned Robert Thompson, one of many founders of the North Dakota Corn Growers Affiliation.

North Dakota corn producers searched for somebody, some place to take their crop.

“Everyone was in tune with what was occurring, and we simply wanted to do it, and we did it,” Thompson mentioned of the forming of The North Dakota Corn Growers Affiliation.

“We had been actually in search of some technique to do away with the corn, we had been increasing so quick,” Thompson added.

They discovered that means by way of ethanol producers. It was 1986, and WDAY was there, speaking with farmer Robert Thompson, one of many founders again then.

These corn growers would take drastic measures to persuade folks to purchase ethanol, even providing them yellow, painted nickels if they’d purchase ethanol.

When Thompson’s father farmed many years in the past, they solely dreamed of corn harvests like there are right this moment. Thompson is now farming together with his twin sons, and there are ethanol vegetation throughout the state that course of it for your entire nation.