Carbon Footprints Are Getting Down on the Farm

What with markets being closed today, I thought I‘d take a different route this week and tell you a little bit about my childhood.

My grandfather was a farmer and my father grew up helping take care of that farm.

Dad went on to get a Ph.D. in biology (just like my mother), though, and became a pharmacologist (and NIH expert, for that matter).

And while I’ll always be impressed by (and extremely proud of) what he (and Mom) accomplished, the allure of the farm has always been there for me.

There’s just something sort of romantic about how my grandparents lived.

Thank God I’m a Country Boy

I spent many weeks during the summers of my youth running through farm fields, playing in corn bins, and building forts from dusty bales in the hay mow.

But one of the most exciting things about farms, especially for adolescent boys, is the heavy machinery.

Packing what my grandfather referred to as the “tool shed” (which was actually an aluminum barn about three times the size of my house) from wall to wall were the vibrant colors of the tractors, combines, wagons, and other equipment he used to put the plants into the grounf and get them out.

John Deere green. International red. Ford blue. Allis-Chalmers orange. Case gray. Minneapolis-Moline yellow. And Massey Ferguson red and silver.

I learned a whole different color pallete from pretty much all of my peers thanks to the manufacturers’ desire to set themselves apart back in the 1930s when they went from drab to bright colors.

Granddad would take my sister and I for rides in the front-end loader he had on the Case IH 300 and even taught us how to drive the old Farmall H with its narrow front axle…

It was always one of the highlights of the trip to get to climb around the huge machines he used on the farm — for me, at least. I’m not sure how my sister felt about all that.

So agricultural equipment, though you might find it somewhat odd, holds a place in my heart.

It reminds me of my grandparents, who shuffled off this mortal coil years ago. It reminds me of my childhood, which ended even before my time with Grandmom and Granddad did.

It reminds me of where I come from. It reminds me how important farming and farmers are to civilization.

It also reminds me that we have to take care of the Earth if we hope that the Earth will keep taking care of us.

Unsung Early Adopters

My grandparents were stewards of the land, taking care of it, improving it, and making sure it would bear fruit (or grain, in this case) long after they were buried under it.

All farmers are. Without that land, they’re nothing. And if they don’t take care of that land, that land will stop taking care of them. It’s a hard truth many of them and their parents learned during the Dust Bowl.

So it should be no surprise that some of the earliest advances in alternative transportation and alternative energy technology were adopted by farmers long before the rest of us caught on.

Farmers have been using biodiesel to power their equipment and reduce their carbon emissions since before Willie Nelson thought it was cool.

They’ve been taking advantage of wind power, hydro power, and solar power since the first windmills, water wheels, and solar panels were invented (one could even say they’ve been taking advantage of the sun’s energy since the dawn of farming).

And now they’re making another switch.

As those diesel tractors they switched to run on corn and soybean oil get older and break down beyond repair, farmers now have a viable option for replacing them with equipment that creates zero emissions (instead of just drastically reduced ones, as with biodiesel) AND keeps their equipment moving forward even better than diesel!

But despite what Elon Musk and the rest of the electric vehicle fanatics want you to believe, this new machinery has about as much to do with batteries as your great grandfather’s Model T.

You see, while EVs are great for light-duty applications like getting you to the office or the grocery store, they fail miserably when it comes to heavy-duty ones.

From my other articles on the topic, you already know that they’re just not powerful enough to handle extremely heavy loads.

And in order to give them more power, you have to add exponentially more weight in the form of bigger batteries.

But when it comes to agricultural activities, there’s a whole other reason they’re not hitting a farm field near you anytime soon…

Farming Ain’t a Day Job

When it’s time to plant crops (or time to harvest them, for that matter), you’ve got a very short window in which to do it.

And even small farmers have thousands of acres to sow and then reap.

So when the time is right and the weather allows you to get out into the fields, you plant (or harvest) 24 hours a day, seven days a week until it’s done.

When your tractors run out of fuel, you drive a fuel truck out to the field, fill them back up, and keep on farming.

And that’s something the folks trying to design electric tractors just don’t get. Those people go home at the end of the day, even if there’s still more work left to be done.

Farmers don’t have that luxury. And what that means is that farmers aren’t going to stop harvesting for even a few hours to recharge a dead battery.

If there’s not a way to fill that battery back up as fast as you can fill a fuel tank back up, they’re just not interested.

Because that extra time out of the field during the harvest means a few hundred acres are going to go to waste because you can’t get to them before the rains come and they start to mildew and mold.

During planting season, it means some of your fields aren’t getting planted this year and you’ll have that much less crop to harvest and sell when the time comes.

So if you were hoping to see EV tractors out there plowing up the fields in the Midwest, I’m sorry to burst your bubble.

But if all you wanted to see was zero-emission tractors out there harvesting the food we all depend on for survival, then I’ve got great news for you…

Blue Gas to the Rescue

Agricultural equipment manufacturers all over the world, from U.S.-based John Deere to German Fendt to Japanese Kubota, are all racing to introduce the world’s first hydrogen-powered tractors.

Now, I’ve dubbed this impressive fuel source “Blue Gas” because it works practically like the gasoline we’re all used to, but produces zero emissions.

In fact, its only byproducts are pure oxygen and water clean enough to safely drink, hence the blue in “Blue Gas.”

And the thing is, while there are several other potential zero-emission fuels under research, hydrogen is the only one that’s beyond that stage.

It’s already being used to power hundreds of thousands of vehicles all around the world…

From the forklifts that move your Amazon stuff around those massive warehouses and distribution centers to trains transporting passengers across Europe to ferries ferrying folks around Asia…

Hydrogen is no experimental fuel. It’s proven. It’s commercialized.

And its market share is growing every single day as more and more heavy-duty operators realize it’s the ONLY viable option for reducing carbon footprints AND keeping operations moving along at pace.

From mega mining vehicles the size of buildings to massive harvesters reaping millions of tons of grain, these hydrogen-powered vehicles are being adopted at an accelerating rate.

And there’s one company every single equipment-maker switching to hydrogen wants to work with…

It was founded by the NASA researchers who invented the fuel cells that allow hydrogen to function as a zero-emission fuel.

And it’s steadily inking contract after contract to supply its high-tech, high-power fuel solutions to vehicle manufacturers the world over.

It’s helping power the trains that run on the Canadian Pacific Kansas City (CPKC) railroad lines. It’s also going to be powering Ford’s newest line of medium- and heavy-duty trucks (even an F-150 or two, from what I hear).

It’s already powering mining trucks in some of the most extreme environments on the planet (where batteries literally can’t operate).

And it’s helping keep buses running all over the European Union.

This is no experiment. This is proven technology that’s quickly reaching mass adoption.

It’s likely going to benefit the manufacturers making the switch…

But the biggest benefits will go to the company supplying all the power blocks to all those various vehicle manufacturers.

So instead of betting on the companies selling the vehicles to the consumers, I’m adamant investors need to be betting on the company making all the cells that power all those vehicles.

And to help make it as easy as possible for every single one of you to get a stake in the extremely profitable future I see coming, I want to share a presentation detailing exactly how to do it.

It’s 100% free and my gift to you. There’s no obligation at all. I just want to get this information out there so everyone can take advantage of it.

This opportunity is just too good to keep under wraps.

So take some time today while you’re enjoying the last hours before the unofficial end of summer and learn more about how hydrogen is reshaping the world of heavy machinery and how you can profit as it does.

I’ll be back later this week with more ways for you to maximize your profit potential.

Have a great holiday!

To your wealth,

Jason Williams

@TheReal_JayDubs

Angel Research on Youtube

After graduating Cum Laude in finance and economics, Jason designed and analyzed complex projects for the U.S. Army. He made the jump to the private sector as an investment banking analyst at Morgan Stanley, where he eventually led his own team responsible for billions of dollars in daily trading. Jason left Wall Street to found his own investment office and now shares the strategies he used and the network he built with you. Jason is the founder of Main Street Ventures, a pre-IPO investment newsletter; the founder of Future Giants, a nano cap investing service; and authors The Wealth Advisory income stock newsletter. He is also the managing editor of Wealth Daily. To learn more about Jason, click here.

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