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I wonder how much of your land you would need to set aside to grow enough of your own ethanol or biodiesel. that would cut a lot of oil needed to farm. you take your corn to the local ethanol plant and next year you don't need oil for your tractors.
"I wonder how much of your land you would need to set aside to grow enough of your own ethanol or biodiesel. that would cut a lot of oil needed to farm. you take your corn to the local ethanol plant and next year you don't need oil for your tractors."
We currently "hobby farm" about 60 acres. I could provide a good years supply of bio-diesel for our needs with 10-15 acres of rape seed. However if you have a bad year, drought, locusts or whatever; you may not get that harvest and be in a bind for the following season.
If it where so easy...
How about supplying the fuel for the fertilizer production, transportation, herbicides, insecticides, miners for the steel on your tractor, Oil production for your tires etc, etc, etc...
Once you really crunch the numbers you would have to devote your whole farm plus 20%...
Ethanol is a bad joke.
If you used a horse instead of a tractor you would only require 1/3rd of your farm..
We cannot go back to horses there is no way we can go to ethanol...
> If you used a horse instead of a tractor you would only require 1/3rd of your farm..
Do you have a substantive reference for this data point?
I can't say when, but we will go back to using horses eventually, especially if we don't conserve fuel sources by planning the weaning away from the ridiculous squandering due to automobility, which is a twentieth century historical flash in the plan. The way things are going, I foresee a terrible crash with respect to work and transportation needs currently subsidized by oil and other energy resources.
We probably should be Planning the conservation and population growth of draft animals so that we will not be left stranded with only human power to run our farms and deliver our goods. Such planning should be in the context of a larger plan that will make demand-side management the keystone, that is rebuilding our 20th century suburbs to make them walkable. We need to build and stock economic/community centers in all neighborhoods where all residents can get the things we need within walking distance. Let's bring the goods and services to the people rather than all this wasteful shopping behavior.
The assumption of automobility is absurd within a historical perspective.
Corn is a great converter of sunlight that is being grown on some of the best land in the world and in some of the best weather. It is the grain of N. America.
On a small scale a farmer would never make ethanol to run his tractor.
Show me a link to a small farmer raising and making his tractor fuel.
Why would anyone believe that small-scale alcohol production would somehow be more efficient than large-scale, when all industrial wisdom teaches us the opposite?
who said efficiency was the concern?
You are right - as long as transportation costs are a relatively minor factor. Once motor fuel becomes really expensive, subtracting out the round trip from farm to processing plant to farm might be enough to offset those economies of scale.
Unless I am very much mis-informed, most tractors run on diesel, not gasoline. Thus, it would be biodiesel, not ethanol, that farmers would need to produce to fuel their equipment. If they do have any gasoline-powered equipment, I am pretty sure that diesel-powered alternatives exist. Farmers would be well advised to ditch their gasoline-powered equipment and switch to diesel, as they will undoubtedly realize some fuel economies, and leave better options open for themselves in the future.
I think because of the high octane content of ethanol it could be used as a diesel engine fuel with some modifications.
"I wonder how much of your land you would need to set aside to grow enough of your own ethanol or biodiesel."
Less than the land needed to feed oxen or horses for the same work.
We worked through this on a series of posts last summer. The best I could determine, working with sunflowers one could probably produce enough biodiesel to power typical temperate-zone farm machinery with possibly around 5-10% of total cultivated acreage. I selected sunflowers because they have better oil yield than soybeans; while they yield a little lower than rapeseed, they are much easier for farmers across a broader area without previous experience with them to start growing. If need be, sunflowers could even be planted and harvested by hand, and the seeds could be pressed by hand. To my way of thinking, sunflowers thus are a good candidate for low-tech, alternative technology applications. To me, they were an answer to the question: How will the farmers keep their tractors running if there is no more oil? It is not the only possible answer, perhaps not even the best one. But I am reasonably satisfied that it is a feasible answer, and good enough of an answer that I need not stay awake at night worrying about how the tractors will stay fueled and running.