Climate Desk: After getting slammed last summer, ethanol producers are hoping to catch a break--but their fate is far from settled.
Bill Pracht has bad memories of last summer. "The drought was so bad here that the corn was just decimated," he recalls of the farm country around Garnett, Kan., where he oversees East Kansas Agri-Energy, an ethanol plant. "Many fields were zero."
In August, corn prices hit their highest level ever, driven mainly by the severe drought that crippled America`s corn belt. By October,...