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82 comments on Calling All Ethanol Proponents

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Jason Bradford on June 11, 2007 - 12:40pm

Robert, I want to clarify what you mean by a "process not dependent on biomass coming into a point source." There's no central processing facility to make the ethanol?

Glad you are keeping away from turnip trucks, but I am skeptical about any claims of "not depleting the soil." This would be a reinvention of agriculture and I hope you are right!

Perhaps the major problem with agriculture is that soil carbon is lost during cultivation. If you can use a mix of perennial crops, harvest the above ground biomass only, and make sure all animal and manufacturing byproducts based on that harvest go back to the land...perhaps the process is sustainable.

There's a paper in Nature by Tilman and others from Univ. of Minesota on the biomass of praire ecosystems and the potential for sustained harvests. The key is to NOT focus on one productive crop, but used a mixed species system.

I am not sure whether I should wish you luck or hope for a complete failure!

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airdale on June 11, 2007 - 1:46pm

A little OT but since you brought it up.

Nitrogen can be produced by lightening and other artifacts of nature, I read. Letting land lie fallow is also a means of reinvorigating it.

As I have stated elsewhere we had NO fertilizer except for animal manure back in my youth on the farm so we had a very large mix. Sheep,ducks,geese,cows,pigs and mules. We gathered hay on a field then not for several years.

We lived without those chemical nutrients and did ok.
HOWEVER there was NO lime. Today the lands are kept to certain PH levels by hauling and spreading lime.

Thinking about that I realized that entirely different varieties of hay were grown then. Ones that I no longer see.

My point is that very much is going to have to change. Way way back to what it was like back in the 30s and 40s.

I am agreeing with you on this. Many think of farming as just not too complicated. Its gotten real complicated and returning to the past is going to likewise be very complicated , if we can do it at all or let nature take its course, which might mean far far too long.

I speak of the upper south Mississippi valley region.

Calif and others are far different I would suppose.

Airdale-we have a big big turnaround if this country loses chemical nutrient inputs and I believe it will do so

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