It’s planting time across America's Corn Belt, and the Cantrell family farm is in overdrive.
Don Cantrell and his son Kyle are planting 4,600 acres of corn and soybeans on the farm that Don’s grandfather started in Cluster County, Nebraska, the better part of a century ago.
Yields have never been better in what has traditionally been the top corn-producing county in the Cornhusker State, but getting those crops to market is another story.
With North America enjoying an oil and gas boom, trains pulling crude oil have squeezed out farmers like Cantrell trying to move their grain to the market.
"It’s a new phenomenon through here," he said of the veritable pipelines on rails that have become a frequent sight on the east-west line across Central Nebraska. "Two years ago even, I don’t think I would have seen it."
It's a problem Cantrell and some other famers across the Midwest believe could be solved by the Keystone XL pipeline.
Last month, President Obama once again postponed a decision on the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, which would move Canadian tar sands and North Dakota’s Bakken shale oil to refineries along the Gulf of Mexico. As advocates on both sides play political tug-of-war, energy producers have increasingly turned to the rails.
Crude oil pulled by rail has increased from 9,500 carloads in 2008 to an estimated 400,000 last year, according to the Association of American Railroads.
Just up the road from the Cantrells’ farm in Anselmo is a grain elevator that last week saw its first train in four months; it was designed to take in a train every week or so. Next to the elevator's bins, an enormous pyramid of corn is piled under a white tarp. This so-called ground pile – emergency storage of possibly 1 million bushels or more – needs to be moved before moisture ruins it.
Randall C. Gordon
National Grain and Feed Association president
It's a scene you'll find across the Upper Midwest, where grain elevators are filled to capacity as a spring wheat harvest looms. The pileup is lowering the prices farmers receive for their crop. By fall harvest, Custer Country farmers stand to lose more than $4 million as a result.
“The gravity, magnitude and scope of rail service disruptions now being experienced are unprecedented, and have rippled through all sectors of grain-based agricultural,” Randall C. Gordon, president of the National Grain and Feed Association, testified at a federal hearing last month.
And according to Mark Watne, president of the North Dakota Farmers Union, railroads are giving oil shipments top priority, ahead of farmers.
The increase in crude oil by rail has also raised safety concerns. Last week, a crude oil train derailed in Lynchburg, Va., triggering a fire and an oil spill in the James River. And last summer, a crude oil train derailed and caught fire in the Canadian town of Lac-Megantic, Quebec, killing 47.
The Transportation Department issued an emergency order on Wednesday requiring railroads to notify state emergency management officials when large shipments of crude are moving through their states, and cautioned railroads against using older tank cars because they rupture more easily in accidents.
It’s for the sake of safety, and also his crops, that Cantrell supports the Keystone XL pipeline. But his state is divided, with Nebraska farmers who want the pipeline on one side facing the ranchers, tribes and others who fear the pipeline could destroy their way of life.
“We are concerned about tar sands. We’re dealing with this new form of oil in our country,” said Jane Kleeb, executive director of Bold Nebraska, a group opposed to the pipeline.
Last month, Kleeb helped organize a Cowboys Indian Alliance rally, with an encampment of teepees, in the nation’s capital, urging lawmakers to consider the risks the pipeline might pose. She pointed to pipeline ruptures near the Kalamazoo River in Michigan and in Mayflower, Arkansas, as examples of the damage tar sands spills can cause.
“They still haven’t cleaned up those tar sands spills. We don’t want to see that in Nebraska,” she said. “It’s not just an infrastructure project. You’re messing with folks’ legacies.”
Across Nebraska, farmers like the Cantrell family rely on the Oglala Aquifer, a vast underground source of water for irrigation. Opponents of the Keystone XL pipeline argue a spill could endanger the water supply that is the lifeblood for farmers.
Cantrell is no activist, though. He’s got planting to do.
Amid the U.S. quest for energy independence, Al Jazeera goes inside the communities at the center of the debate to explore the rewards – and the risks – of the choices at hand.
The derailment adds to growing concern about shipping oil by rail
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