177 comments on Corn-Based Ethanol: Is This a Solution?
Comments can no longer be added to this story.
The contents below are paid advertisements. Their appearance does not imply an endorsement by The Oil Drum.
“Pessimism of the Intellect; Optimism of the Will.”
—Antonio Gramsci
Search The Oil Drum with Google
User login
Contact
- Content: editors at theoildrum dot com
- Tech support: support at theoildrum dot com
Personnel
- Editors: Prof. Goose, Heading Out, Stuart Staniford, Nate Hagens
- DrumBeat Editor: Leanan
- Contributors: ace, Engineer-Poet, Gail the Actuary, jeffvail, JoulesBurn, Khebab, Robert Rapier
- TOD:Local: Glenn
- TOD:Europe: Chris Vernon, Euan Mearns, Francois Cellier, Jerome a Paris, Luís de Sousa, Rembrandt, Rune Likvern, Ugo Bardi
- TOD:Canada: benk, Libelle
- TOD:ANZ: Big Gav, Phil Hart, aeldric
- Technician: Super G
Recently on TOD:World
TOD:Local
- Ask not what your next President can do, Ask what you can do for your tribe
- Summer Streets a Success!
- Plan for Hydro-Fracture Drilling for Unconventional Natural Gas in Upstate New York
TOD:Europe
- UK - Stansted Airport expansion gets go-ahead
- RAMseS: a new agricultural paradigm
- RAMseS: a new agricultural paradigm
TOD:Canada
- In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!
- Compressed Air Energy Storage - How viable is it?
- Oil Megaproject Update (July 2008)
TOD:ANZ
Peak Oil Primers
Blogroll
Energy Sites
- The Coming Global Oil Crisis
- Die Off
- Dry Dipstick
- Energy Bulletin
- From the Wilderness
- Life After the Oil Crash
- Peak Oil Crisis
- Peak Oil News and Message Boards
- Powerswitch
- Rigzone
- Matthew Simmons
- Wolf at the Door
Environment & Sustainability Sites
- The Daily Green
- EcoGeek
- Eco Street
- Green Car Congress
- Green Options
- green.alltop.com
- Gristmill
- RealClimate
- Sustainablog
- Treehugger
- WorldChanging
Blogs
- The Big Picture
- Casaubon's Book
- Cleantech Blog
- Clusterf
k Nation (Jim Kunstler) - The Cost of Energy
- David Strahan
- The Energy Blog
- Entropy Production
- European Tribune
- GraphOilology
- jeffvail.net
- Mobjectivist
- Peak Energy (Australia)
- Peak Energy (USA)
- R-Squared
- Resource Insights
Finance & Economics Blogs
- Calculated Risk
- Ecological Economics
- Econbrowser
- Environmental Economics
- Infectious Greed
- The Mess That Greenspan Made
- Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis
Organizations
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
GAIA Host Collective
do you know the incremental yield on irrigated crops vs dry land farming, on average?
irrigation was a big part of the paper a colleague and I have pending publication called "Burning Water - The Energy Return on Water Invested" - using irrigated water numbers, the best biofuels required 10 times the water input as the most water intensive fossil fuel. But I couldnt find much data on large scale dryland farming, that also included fertilizers, pesticides, etc.
I don't know about an average. Clearly, there are quite a few places where the yield would be zero without irrigation, and can be quite good with irrigation.
I found this Colorado USDA publication. It says that in 2005 in Colorado, the average yield of irrigated corn was 184.0 bushels per acre, while the average yield of the dryland corn was 38.5 bushels per acre.