Case Study #2:
The fall your dryer ran set the price of your barn heat all winter
In 2013 a wet crop put every dryer in the Corn Belt on at once. By February you were paying 56 percent more for the same gallon — and the barns had been running the whole time.
What happened
One wet harvest emptied the Midwest
The 2013 corn crop came off the field big and wet. Dryers across the Midwest ran flat out through October and November, right as the heating season was starting. Regional propane stocks drew down faster than they could be refilled, pipelines ran on allocation, and delivery trucks got rationed.
Then the cold came. National retail propane went from $2.37 a gallon in October to $3.69 by February. In parts of the Midwest, spot deliveries ran well past four dollars. Nothing had happened to the wellhead — U.S. production was fine. What changed was the distance between what propane cost at the hub and what it cost in your tank.
What you paid, delivered
U.S. retail propane, October through March, three consecutive heating seasons
Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration, residential propane price survey.
Why it hit you twice
Your tank doesn't know which load it's feeding
Drying and barn heat are two different jobs, but they draw from the same tank, the same supplier, and the same winter market. A wet fall doesn't just make your drying gas expensive. It sets the price on every gallon you burn for the next five months.
And the timing is not something you can manage around. You dry when the crop is ready. You heat when it's cold. Neither one waits for a better price, and neither one happens in July, when propane is cheapest.
When you burn it, and what it costs
Modelled monthly propane use for a Corn Belt operation with barns and on-farm drying, against the average seasonal shape of delivered and wholesale propane prices
Load modelled from NOAA 1991–2020 heating degree day normals and USDA corn harvest progress. Price shape from EIA delivered and wholesale propane series, indexed so 100 is the annual average.
The dashed line is the part most people get wrong. Propane at the hub is barely seasonal — it costs about the same in January as it does in June. The line that moves is the delivered one, because your supplier's margin runs about 30 percent wider in the middle of winter than it does in August. You are not paying more for propane. You are paying more to have it brought to you at the one time of year everybody needs it brought to them.
What we change
We take the barns off the tank
Fifty Under installs and owns a ground-source heat pump system for your barn climate control. You don't buy the equipment, finance it, or maintain it. You pay a fixed monthly service charge for keeping the barns at temperature — the same way you'd pay for any other service on the operation.
That takes your single largest propane load out of the winter market permanently. When the next wet fall tightens supply, the barns are not in the queue.
A price you can budget
Your barn heating cost is set by contract, not by how wet the crop came off in October. A spike moves our economics, not your operating budget.
No capital, no maintenance
We fund the loop field, the heat pumps and the controls, and we keep them running. Your capital stays in land, livestock and equipment.
Less ventilation to pay for
Burning propane inside a barn puts water into the air, and you ventilate that moisture back out with heat you just paid for. A heat pump doesn't add moisture, so you're not fighting your own heater.
What we don't change
Your dryer still runs on propane
We'll be straight with you, because you'd find out anyway. A high-temperature continuous-flow dryer needs air well above what a ground-source heat pump can deliver. Low-temperature heat pump drying exists in the research literature, but it is slow, capital-heavy and unproven at harvest throughput. We are not going to tell you we can dry your corn.
What we do is take the barns out of the fight. In a year like 2013, your drying gas and your barn heat were competing for the same tank, the same truck and the same allocation — and both got repriced. Move the barns to geothermal and the drying load has the tank to itself, over a shorter window, on a smaller volume. The exposure that's left is the one you actually can't design away.