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Some Delta farmers are developing a new niche selling barley as home heating fuel.

The farmers have a hefty surplus of the crop after demand for their agricultural product, raised as feed for cattle, pigs and chickens, has fallen sharply in the last two years.

At the same time, Interior residents are looking for new, affordable fuels as heating oil prices maintain a brisk climb.

It could be a perfect match.

At least two barley farmers, Bryce Wrigley and Gary Sonnichsen, have keyed in on new opportunities to market the tiny golden grains that pack a BTU punch. They’re bagging the harvests as Eco-Heat, an environmentally friendly, low-cost alternative to home heating oil — and betting Interior residents’ need for home heating relief will offer barley farmers a way to reap new opportunity in tough times.

“If we can create a new industry and produce heat for people’s homes, that’s a new market,” Wrigley said.

He and Sonnichsen eagerly list barley’s benefits.

For one, it’s a whole lot cheaper than using oil to heat a home.

By their calculations, three gallons of fuel oil has the same number of British thermal units — heat equivalent — as one bushel of barley, which is about 40 to 50 pounds of grain. Broken down, oil costs about $38.01 per million BTU. And barley? Try $18 per million BTU, less than half the cost of oil.

“When you push the numbers, it is absolutely unbelievable,” Wrigley said. “It is so good that it’s hard for people to believe.”

Barley is easy to store and easy to move from bins to stoves. When burned in a stove, the grain generates fewer emissions than wood, adding an incentive to environmentally conscientious homeowners and for everyone affected by winter burn bans, they said. Using barley for home heat could also lessen carbon footprints. The carbon cycle of barley — the amount of time it takes for growing material to absorb the carbon created by burning the material — is one year, while wood has a cycle of 25 years, and oil a cycle of 40 million years. Plus, shipment holds no risk of hazardous materials spills or leaks.

And, barley can go straight from the field to drying bins to the stove — unlike wood, which has to be dried and pressed into pellets at production facilities, all of which uses energy.

“God made pellets out of it for us, so we don’t have to do that,” Sonnichsen said.

These farmers see some less-obvious benefits that mean a lot to them personally.

Barley and other renewables lessen U.S. dependence on foreign oil, thereby enhancing national security, they said.

“There’s a peg for everybody to hang their hat on,” Wrigley said. “I can’t imagine a more renewable resource.”

The key to success, they know, will be convincing everyone else that barley really does work.

Both are sure that once people feel the cost savings and consider the environmental benefits, their infant industry will take off. And they’re quite confident the Delta region’s farmers can produce enough of the grain each year to feed a steady supply into homes.

“We can grow all that we can use,” Wrigley projected.

The number of acres of barley grown in the Tanana Valley has declined in recent years, a function of supply and demand laws as farmers need less feed for fewer animals. Traditional markets have dropped off so much in the past year that Wrigley and Sonnichsen had about 60 percent of their 2007 harvest still sitting in silos this spring.

The region’s barley market desperately needs stability, said Phil Kaspari, an agricultural agent in Delta for the University of Alaska’s Cooperative Extension Service. Ideally, he said, Alaska would have more cows to feed, but it’s hard for a farmer to count on that. Sonnichsen and Wrigley are on the right track, he said, and have put good thought into creating a new market for their product.

When 2007 sales were so slow, farmers looked into export potential; after all, barley sold for nearly $300 a ton in Oregon last winter while prices in Alaska were as low as $155 a ton. Transportation costs killed any hopes of an export business.

“There is a real strong commodity market worldwide right now, but it is very difficult for Alaska producers to tap into that market,” Kaspari said.

There was time to think outside the box, with such a high percentage of excess after the harvest.

“There’s a lot of unsold stock here in Delta,” Sonnichsen said. “The good thing about barley is it’s here, now, today.”

For neighbors in a farming community, a handshake is often as good as a paper-and-ink contract. Sonnichsen and Wrigley formed a loose partnership to evaluate markets for their barley, and this winter poured the grain into 50-pound sacks, slapping on Eco-Heat labels bearing a simple sketch of barn, silo and windmill. “Locally grown barley stove fuel: Renewable fuels help end our dependence on foreign oil,” the tags read.

A supply contract confirmed in June with Don Trometter’s North Pole Pipe and Supply was good news.

“It’ll take things like that — proof of a market,” Wrigley predicted.

Trometter sells outdoor furnaces equipped to burn grain — but better yet for the farmers, can offer a personal testimonial to the grain’s heating value. He fed barley into an outdoor furnace hooked to his cavernous shop last winter — “and found out it works really good,” Trometter said.

As well as selling outdoor furnaces made by Central Boiler, he is retailing 50-pound sacks and 1,500-pound bulk packages of barley bagged in Delta.

In Fairbanks, Mark Wiebold of The Woodway agreed barley has tremendous potential for Interior residents stricken by heating oil prices. The grain is so promising that Wiebold is a little concerned about how to meet local demand for his Harmon-brand stoves, which the manufacturer has on backorder.

“We got excited about barley last year, when they were talking about closing the state dairy,” Wiebold said. He’s sold home grain stoves to Sonnichsen and Wrigley, and to about another dozen customers in the area. “Right now, barley is kind of a sleeper. There is real potential there, and we’re really excited about it.”

Beyond its benefits as a renewable resource, Wiebold likes being able to buy local. A dollar spent with a Delta farmer, he said, is a dollar that flows right back into Fairbanks the following weekend.

In the farm country surrounding Delta, Gary Sonnichsen tooled down a gravel road in an aged Dodge pickup, window down, his elbow on the sill. Dust was at a minimum, thanks to recent rain. That moisture is usually a good sign to a farmer, but Sonnichsen was hoping the four-inch tall blades of barley in his field will soak up some nourishing sun soon.

They’re a little shorter than they ought to be this time of year.

He pulled to a stop before a curtain of aspen threaded with birch.

That’s the thing about Alaska farming, he grinned. You could drive right down the road and miss it completely.

But through an opening, Sonnichsen’s 210 acres of barley sets the ground aglow in rich green. The Granite Mountains in the background block views of the Alaska Range — not such a bad barrier to look at from the seat of a tractor.

Stooping to snatch a weed from the fine rows of barley, he said it was time to spray. But what the tender shoots really needed, he said, was sunshine and warmth in bulk.

With the right mixture of sun and rain, fertilizer and weeding, the grain will grow more than waist-high before the stalk dies and the feathered heads curl over, signaling harvest time.

Sonnichsen is thinking big. He sees future partnerships with Interior villages, where barley could be barged in safely as an alternative to expensive heating oil. Even small schools and government buildings in villages could install grain stoves, he mused.

“To my mind, it’d be a real good way to heat schools,” Sonnichsen said. “It seems like a pretty natural thing to me. And they’re looking at some pretty high prices this year. I don’t know where the money is going to come from.”

Wiebold, too, sees potential for isolated areas, where residents could, quite literally, grow their own heat.

“They talk about a world economy. I think we need to be focusing on what we can do here,” he said. “We’re not as vulnerable to outside influences.”

Even with the potential for a new market, barley farmers are facing tough times. Oil prices are affecting their business costs and the way they farm.

Down the road from Sonnichsen’s farm, Dolly, an aging Labrador retriever, greets visitors at the Alaska Farmer’s Co-op with a bark when tires crunch in the gravel lot. Inside, Dave Ferdinand keep a dry-erase calendar with each day’s temperature recorded for easy reference — highs and lows, a diary of the things that matter in farm country. Fertilizer prices are posted on the opposite wall, painting a bleak picture of skyrocketing costs for the ingredients that help grain grow tall. The closure of the Agrium fertilizer plant in Nikiski last winter was a real blow to farmers throughout Alaska, he said.

“Everything’s doubled,” Ferdinand said. He supplies farmers and collects some of their crops to sell in bulk from silos at the co-op. “Except the wholesale cost of barley hasn’t changed much.”

With times so tough and his greatest hope in an infant market, why does Sonnichsen keep farming?

“I don’t know,” he grinned. “It’s not a sensible thing.”

But it is a life the farmer loves, and one that new markets might just enable him to keep on living.