The Oil Drum | Biofuels: Bring back the Prairie

88 comments on Biofuels: Bring back the Prairie

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MicroHydro on December 8, 2006 - 6:08am

Not only that, but oxen (and goats) are good for pulling wagons. Byproducts include meat, milk, leather, and fiber.

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bunyonhead on December 8, 2006 - 8:28am

Cows (and sheep, etc) are huge emitters of methane - 14% of global release. Not good considering that methane has 20 times the "greenhousing" effect of CO2

12:40 01Dec2005 RTRS-Cure for cow flatulence cooked up by UK scientists

LONDON, Dec 1 (Reuters) - Cows belching and breaking wind cause methane pollution but British scientists say they have developed a diet to make pastures smell like roses -- almost.
"In some experiments we get a 70 percent decrease (in methane emissions), which is quite staggering," biochemist John Wallace told Reuters in a telephone interview.
Wallace, leader of the microbial biochemistry group at the Rowett Research Institute in Aberdeen, said the secret to sweeter-smelling cows is a food additive based on fumaric acid, a naturally occurring chemical essential to respiration of animal and vegetable tissues.
A 12-month commercial and scientific evaluation of the additive has just begun, but he said if it proves successful it could be a boon to cutting down on greehouse gas emissions.
"In total around 14 percent of global methane comes from the guts of farm animals. It is worth doing something about," Wallace said. Other big sources of methane are landfills, coalmines, rice paddies and bogs.
Scientists in Australia and New Zealand have also been working to develop similar products amid growing concern about greenhouse gas emissions from cattle and sheep.
In New Zealand the government in 2003 proposed a flatulence tax, with methane emitted by farm animals responsible for more than half the country's greenhouse gases. The plan was ultimately withdrawn after widespread protests.
"We've had more success than they (scientists in Australia and New Zealand) have. Everyone has been trying different methods. We just got lucky," Wallace said.
((Reporting by Nigel Hunt, editing by Michael Roddy; email: nigel.hunt@reuters.com; RM: nigel.hunt.reuters.com@reuters.net; +44 (0)20 7542 8421)

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davidsmi on December 8, 2006 - 10:38am

But putting cows out in pastures won't necessarily increase the total number contributing methane. If this change in values was accompanied by a move to eat less meat then we could empty the feed lots.

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elwoodelmore on December 8, 2006 - 10:43am

i think you should be working on a devise (ie insert nozzle) to capture that methane at its source

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Bitteroldcoot on December 8, 2006 - 12:32pm

I'd always read that the methane production of cattle was due mostly to mankind meddling in their diet. They were not designed to handle a diet of potatoes, sugar beets, corn and grain, they were designed for grass. We feed them the other stuff to fatten them up for market. If I remember correctly the standard feedlot diet disagrees with them so much, they have to have a constant supply of anti-gas medication added to their feed (bicarbonate of soda?).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feedlot

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jjhman on December 9, 2006 - 5:16pm

I know that happens to me

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JMG on December 8, 2006 - 2:21pm

Above was a bit "tongue in cheek"; I was really thinking that the processes of nature are optimized for energy collection and transfer over both distance (microns to kilometers) and time scales (days to seasons to years) in the ecosystem through coevolution of all the components, whether plants, soil microbes or herbivores (microbes to insects to ruminants). Anything we humans do that perturbs such systems likely markedly decreases that the system's energy capture and transfer if we reduce or stop our inputs - tillage, fertilzer, irrigation, monoculture and so on.

Wildlife biologist Allan Savory, Holistic Management International, recognized this many years ago in African game-forage ecosystems and wrote a book on the principles called Holistic Resource Management. As I recall, he found that removing one of the components, such as excess game offtake, reduced the forage production and hence energy production in systems where coevolution had occurred. One of the signals was a decrease in successional complexity, which is exactly what we do when we impose a monoculture.

An important aspect of decreasing successional complexity that is often overlooked is the decrease in system resilience. One aspect is the increased spread of infectious agents. Plants have infectious diseases just as we do and packing plants together in a monoculture provides great opportunity for emergence and spread of these agents. The use of particular new species for monoculture cultivation for biomass production puts the system at risk because, compared to the other plant species under extensive cultivation, we likely know very little about the diseases of the new species in such systems. Even with the knowledge we have developed over many years of research, we still constantly fight such diseases in the species we have under cultivation.

An example is asian soybean rust

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InfinitePossibilities on December 8, 2006 - 2:51pm

"I was really thinking that the processes of nature are optimized for energy collection and transfer over both distance (microns to kilometers) and time scales"

This opinnion, unless a humoristic entry, would be greatly ignorant of how evolution works. Plants produce hard cellulose walls and any number of nasty chemistry for a simple purpose: they are trying to make it harder for herbivors to eat and to digest them. There is, of course, a co-evolution going on between plants and herbivors. By large the plants are winning. We are the perfect example of just that: we have essentially given up to compete on that level of the game and are have resolved to eating the herbivors that haven't quit the plant battle, yet.

Absolute energy efficiency is, in most eco-systems, not a problem or we would have seen plants with photochemical mechanisms far superior to photosynthesis. After all... a silicon solar cell beats photosynthesis by a factor of 20! But it seems to be harder for evolution to switch from the local extremum that photosynthesis represents to a totally different chemical electron transfer and storage mechnism than to keep improving other survival mechanisms (like toxins). As long as everyone competes using the same photosynthesis engine, there is very little selection pressure from that side.

As a result... we can not expect to get much more energy out of plants than we already are (except that we don't use most of it efficiently). We could get two orders of magnitude more energy out of solar cells, though.

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davidsmi on December 8, 2006 - 3:12pm

"This opinnion, unless a humoristic entry, would be greatly ignorant of how evolution works. Plants produce hard cellulose walls and any number of nasty chemistry for a simple purpose: they are trying to make it harder for herbivors to eat and to digest them."

Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. The suggestion that there is some purpose in the way evolution works, that evolution did something in order to accomplish something else, suggests a fundamental misunderstanding of the process.

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markincalgary on December 8, 2006 - 7:47pm

The first paragraph in this comment is the funniest thing I've read on this site in a long time.

Yes, there is a co-evolution going on between plants and herbivores. Looked at the level of populations, rather than individuals, there is some give and take, but the relationship is largely a symbiotic one. Herbivores distribute seeds, either by their intestinal tract, or by their coats. The same goes for pollen. That act would be a good trade from the grass' perspective, but there's another important benefit that the herbivore brings: The creation and maintenance of habitat.

Perennial grasses (and clovers) that co-evolve with herbivores must be able to withstand being cropped every couple of years. Plants that can't deal with this cropping as well, can't compete in such an environment. This fact is why the plains were covered in perennial grasses (and clovers) but not trees. If it weren't for the herbivores, trees would have taken over much more of the plains. If the plants are winning, they are winning with the help of the herbivores.

But your last two paragraphs are just about bang on. I won't quibble the details because it would muddy an very insightful point.

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phineas gage on December 9, 2006 - 8:02am

Perennial grasses (and clovers) that co-evolve with herbivores must be able to withstand being cropped every couple of years

take it even further- perennial grasses and clovers depend on being cropped regularly for their survival. At least in the midwest, if a field is not regularly cut down by burning, mowing or herbivorous chewing, it will be replaced by forest in short order. This is part of the natural symbiosis between grazing animals and perennial grasses.

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