Colorado Farmer Elected to National Corn Board

Colorado Farmer Elected to National Corn Board

Maura Bennett
Maura Bennett
For the first time in 20 years a farmer from Colorado sits on the board of the National Corn Growers Association.

For the first time in 20 years a farmer from Colorado sits on the board of the National Corn Growers Association.

Mike Lefever, farmer and immediate past president of the Colorado Corn Administrative Committee (CCAC), was elected to serve on the NCGA board during the recent Corn Congress in Washington D.C.

While the NCGA's mission is to increase opportunities for corn growers he says his focus will be on how producers of every commodity and product from every state gets their products shipped nationwide and globally.

"The one I really want to see worked on is our locks and dams on the Missouri, the Mississippi, the llinois, the Ohio Rivers. They're so antiquated that we're going to lose a lot of our business to the rest of the world. Companies are going to gravitate where transportation is the cheapest and the quickest. And China is dumping billions of dollars into Brazil and Argentina and building up their infrastructure. If those two countries raise two crops of corn, they're going to become our biggest competitors. If we can't get our waterways up to par, modernized we're going to lose that. This isn't just agricultural this is general mercantile that goes up and down that river."

During his twenty-four-year history at the state level Lefever has been a director and officer for both the Administrative Committee and Growers Association. Lefever farms near Longmont.

Colorado produces about 180-million bushels of corn annually.

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