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Subject: Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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Chronological Thread  
  • From: Jean French <jwf267@yahoo.com>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] Livingontheland Digest, Vol 165, Issue 6
  • Date: Mon, 27 Oct 2008 09:06:34 -0700 (PDT)

Ethanol has at least 2 other problems, one of which was discussed in yesterday's Washington Post.  Refining ethanol in rural areas then requires transporting ethanol to other areas, which is not as safe as it may seem.  Check out the article in the Washington Post's website from yesterday.
 
The other problem is that using crop residue, or even weeds or crops for ethanol robs  agriculture of compost and other nutrients, which are desperately needed for healthy soil.  I certainly cannot take that away from my soil and expect to grow decent crops.  Building soil is key, not impoverishing the soil so transportation can take what my crops need.
 
Becky French
Maryland 


--- On Sun, 10/26/08, livingontheland-request@lists.ibiblio.org <livingontheland-request@lists.ibiblio.org> wrote:
From: livingontheland-request@lists.ibiblio.org <livingontheland-request@lists.ibiblio.org>
Subject: Livingontheland Digest, Vol 165, Issue 6
To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
Date: Sunday, October 26, 2008, 1:20 PM

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Today's Topics:

   1. Re: The Importance of Seed Saving (Liz)
   2. Whatever happened to cellulosic ethanol? (Tradingpost)


----------------------------------------------------------------------

Message: 1
Date: Sat, 25 Oct 2008 09:42:49 -0400
From: Liz <liz@allslash.org>
Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] The Importance of Seed Saving
To: Healthy soil and sustainable growing
	<livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org>
Message-ID: <1224943266_12060@mail2.swva.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed

At 09:31 PM 10/24/2008, you wrote:

>from a local source near us
>
>  The Importance of Seed Saving
>Written by KT LaBadie
>Thursday, 16 October 2008
>http://www.mrcog-nm.gov/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=254&Itemid=228

Great article. Although you may be preaching to the choir here! I've 
saved my seed for years, though I buy new varieties each year just to 
try them out.

Also, I'm buying my new seed right now, not waiting for spring.

Liz in SW VA
http://life-as-a-spectator-sport.com 



------------------------------

Message: 2
Date: Sat, 25 Oct 2008 20:09:01 -0600
From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
Subject: [Livingontheland] Whatever happened to cellulosic ethanol?
To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
Message-ID: <200810252009010328.13BFDC5A@mail.lobo.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="ISO-8859-1"


Whatever happened to cellulosic ethanol?
AP: cellulosic 'not even close' to being ready to satisfy government
mandates
Tom Philpott at 1:52 PM on 17 Oct 2008
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/10/17/94536/558

For a while, I've been wishing I had time to write a feature on cellulosic
ethanol, the allegedly "green" biofuel that's been "five
years away" from commercial viability for about, oh, two decades. 

Government mandates -- backed by a plethora of tax breaks, grants, and other
goodies -- require production of 16 billions of the stuff by 2022. Today's
production, rounding off, amounts to about zero.

Every once in a while, I catch hints of official skepticism poking through a
veneer of mindless optimism regarding cellulosic ethanol. In January, Colin
Peterson -- chair of the House Ag Committee and a nearly tireless champion of
Big Ag interests -- averred that cellulosic could well never "get off the
ground." Earlier, analysts from the USDA -- which has been plowing cash
into cellulosic for decades -- expressed similar concerns.

Since then, save for occasional news of some techno breakthrough that never
seems to bring commercial viability any closer than five years away, things have
been pretty quiet on the cellulosic front.

Until this week, that is. Associated Press has come out with an article on why
the government's mandates look increasingly unattainable.

The article opens by pointing to a few obvious problems with the cellulosic
mandates:

    No commercial-scale refineries exist, researchers have yet to agree on the
best technology for fuel conversion and there is no distribution network to
handle fuel once it is made.

The article claims that an "estimated 200-plus large-scale facilities are
needed" to crank out enough volume to meet the mandates. No mention of
converting existing conventional ethanol plants -- a prospect that the industry
has held out for years.

It points out another obvious problem with cellulosic ethanol: cellulose tends
to be bulky and not very dense. Shipping it from field to refinery will require
much more truck or train capacity than, say, moving corn from silo to ethanol
plant.

Moreover, unlike corn, "Some of the material, such as switchgrass,
deteriorates more quickly."

The most hopeful bit in the article focuses on a new facility owned by ethanol
giant Poet, specially designed to churn out both conventional and cellulosic
ethanol. The company says the facility will initially make conventional corn
ethanol, but hopes one day it can also utilize cellulose from corn plants:
stalks, cobs, etc. Poet official told AP that:

    We can use the same farmers, the same fields, the same infrastructure to
get cellulose to the plants ... We don't have to reinvent the wheel.

That's awesome, except for one thing -- by turning so-called "crop
waste" into car fuel, you're robbing soil of vital organic matter. I
fear for the soils of the Midwest if cellulosic ethanol ends up sucking up all
the corn stover, which currently rots in fields and slows erosion.

I see two immediate fundamental problems with cellulose as an ethanol source:
1) There just isn't a whole lot of energy in stuff like grass and corn
stalks, and concentrating what energy is there requires lots of energy; and 2)
most cellulose is extremely bulky and not very dense; transporting it from field
to refinery will be an inefficient, energy-intensive process.

Researchers, many on them funded with government cash, have been working
diligently for years to solve the first problem. No one seems to be thinking
much about the second one -- beyond the dodgy idea of using existing corn
infrastructure to grab corn husks and whatnot.

Then there's another, more fundamental problem. Even cellulosic ethanol
requires feedstocks that have been grown in soil. Growing one thing means not
growing another. Cellulosic ethanol could well end up leading to expanded
monocultures and less agro-biodiversity -- and more deforestation and clearing
of carbon sinks and wildlife habitat.

Or, if they never sort out the first problem I mentioned above, it could never
happen at commercial scale at all. That, along with a concerted effort to
rebuild local food systems, re-solarize agriculture, and reinvest in dense
cities and public transportation, might just be the best-case scenario.

Shame that the government is dumping billions of dollars per year into ethanol
when so much else needs to be done.




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End of Livingontheland Digest, Vol 165, Issue 6
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  • Re: [Livingontheland] Livingontheland Digest, Vol 165, Issue 6, Jean French, 10/27/2008

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