permaculture

["robscott@freeshell.org" <robscott@freeshell.org>]

To Will from Oregon,

I'm interested in this.

Could you say more about the "stillage" -- are you saying that bamboo is 
used for alcoholic fermentation, and then the alcohol goes to the stills 
while the bamboo skelatons are then processed by lactic acid fermentation 
microbes to produce a silage for cattle?? What on earth are the microbes 
using at that point, lignin?!?

It's an awesome concept - skimming alcohol before feeding instead of 
wasting methane after - but I requires more details to understand this.

Rob Scott
Urbana, IL

p.s. for people new to this issue: silage is a fermented food for cattle. 
A *silo* is typically packed with say, hay, and digested in a process that 
produces organic acids. Kind of like sauerkraut for cattle, to aid in 
digestion (and thus reduce methane emissions).



> From: Will Carey <cure@rtinet.com>
> Subject: Re: [permaculture] Soil & CO2
>
>
> So the system looks like this:
>
> Pasture runoff =>Nitrogen fixed in Bamboo Bioswales => Bamboo chopped for
> Alcohol Stills =>Predigested "Stillage" fed to Cattle=>lowered Methane
> emissions from ruminants and Biofuels yield.
>
> The late Simon Henderson... Our Bamboo Guru in Seattle.... worked with
> Washington State Extension service on field trials for this sort of thing.
> They had great yields and good results for nitrogen uptake.  But the results
> have not been published, according to Daphne Lewis, who worked with Simon on
> the project.