121 comments on BBC Covers Peak Oil: A Farm for the Future
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121 comments on BBC Covers Peak Oil: A Farm for the Future
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How much diesel is used per acre/hectare for, say, corn?
Nick, their farming is a bit less advanced than our own. I don't think they allow "roundup-ready" seeds, for instance. This would lead to more "cultivation." Less "no-till," I'd think.
Let's put them at about 10 gallons/acre. Maybe, a touch more.
BTW, the UN, through the FAO should be a source for this number if you cared to do a little googling.
Here in Iowa we call that recreational tilling. What in the world are they doing that takes 10 gallons per acre? Raising vegetables and fruit? If they are the UK should be able to feed itself with ease.
Animal agriculture needs less fossil fuel than row crop farming. The energy waste is in the animals themselves since a lot of energy is consumed in just keeping them alive.
Re Farming diesel requirement. In my farming days we ended up using approx. 8-9 Gallon/acre on an annual basis in heavy clay soil. This included 10 passes on each plot. ploughing, compressing, harrow 2 times, sowing, compressing, 1-2 times combined herbicide- fungicide spraying, harvesting, harrowing.
Today with combined machinery you can reduce the diesel expenditure to 4-5 gallon/acre.Maybe a little less in light soils. You can study farm energy expenditures here.
http://www.cde.state.co.us/artemis/ucsu20/ucsu2062250061998internet.pdf
kind regards And1
Yes but nice looking cattle. Limousin. A very good breed. Excellent steaks.
No-till. The way to go but very spray intensive. The planters we use can either do No-till or conventional.
Ifn I was back some years I would go full bore cattle and since my neighbor raises a lot of cattle that is what I would do also. We can trade off bulls that way.
Airdale
Forgive a stupid question, but what does that refer to? Herbicides?
Cheers
No-till came from a gentleman named Faulkner,who wrote a book in the 40's called Ploughman's Folly.
He argued that farmers plowed cause they liked to not because it was necessary.(needless to say, at the time, it caused quite a stir ;-) )
No-till is counting on herbicides for weed control. Then no doubt pesticides when the bugs come. And also speaks to an underlying comfort with mono-culture.
This reliance on 'cides' is a problem because many of the broadleaf weeds are becoming resistant to the herbicides. The organic matter does stay higher and it is a superior way to farm from a chemical perspective.
I have had a project in mind. I bought a 'hoe' drill at an auction. (Since the price of no till drills can cause you to clutch your heart)Hoe drills have a metal boot that has some weight to it that the seed falls into and were originally designed to sow seeds in gravelly soil, since regular drills didn't work well as the seed would routinely wind up on the surface. My plan was to put some cultivators and sweeps behind some disks to make raised beds that I could then use the drill for a no-till idea. I don't use herbicides ever! A one time application of a herbicide can kill off all the algea in the soil. This algea is the food supply for many micro-organisms.
Excessive use of the moldbord plow has created a lot of problems. If you plow your fields routinely you will cause the organic matter to be burnt up by the sun and exposure to the elements. You do need to get oxygen, into the ground however. (Jason's use of the broadfork and feeding the worms, in the other thread is a great idea. As is Airdale's sub-soiler)
My strategy is what's called minimum till. Which means that I plow the ground but very infrequently and then follow with an extensive rotation that includes small grain going into hay (legume mix) for several years then pasturing for several years before repeating the cycle. This option is largely unavailable to corporate monoculture.
No-till I take from Fukuoka, not Faulkner. I have no idea whether Fukuoka knew of Faulkner. Wikipedia has this to say:
I don't see much value to no-till outside the natural farming/permaculture methodology. Exactly as you state, if you do nothing to manage the weeds, but don't till, you are just asking for trouble. It's nothing but spitting into the wind.
It seems to me to be a truism that half-measures typically get you less than half of what you seek.
Thanks for the response.
Cheers
I read 'One Straw Revolution' and very much enjoyed it. His approach supports greater diversity which is definitely a strong plus to the environment and hence organic mindedness.
I'm sorry to see that the same games (corporate/government screw the small farmer is happening in Britain as it is here in North America (I'm in Canada)) So nods Rebecca and Tim for being 'good' stewards of the land, while being financially penalized with the pretext offered that somehow big is more efficient when in fact the opposite is true (somehow people can't understand what subsidies both regulatory and financial mean). Hence 10 people per acre. Hopefully we can get your documentary over here.
Tonight on tvo (tv Ontario) they are playing: 'The End of Suburbia' with James Kunstler followed by another titled:'Life After Suburbia' so I suspect they would love to play your documentary if you could offer it to them or does BBC own it? (www.tvo.org)
Larger diversity in plants used as pasture can support a greater diversity and stocking rate of livestock. You can carry a greater number of different livestock on a piece of land than just one type. Sir Albert Howard in his: 'Agricultural Testement' made reference to imo the great British organic farmer:Friend Sykes. Mr. Sykes wrote a great book: 'titled Humus and the Farmer' that you would enjoy. His understanding of pasture management and vermiculture in the 40's was significant as is Louis Bromfields: Pleasant Valley and Malabar Farm. Though I guess there's nothing new under the sun. As I have an 1840's copy of 'Chronicles of a Clay Farm' wherein the benefits of tile draining and using lime were understood.
A return to the use of grain binders or pull type combines with scour cleaners affords a good weed control strategy. Perhaps we have a bizarre notion of growing just one type of crop at a time.
Other than oats/barley few crops are grown together. Furthermore many 'weed's' are great fodder and provide some natural medicinal and anthelmintic help. Older farms used to grow black walnuts around the barn yards so that the livestock could eat the leaves and get rid of their worms/parasites.
It would seem that we 'the civilized' (hmmm!) world made a very wrong turn in the 40's. And 'we' have chosen to ignore the prescient wisdom of people like those mentioned and others like Wendel Berry in pursuit of the 'new' / 'cutting edge' instead of following what has been tested and true.
Cheers all
"Nick, their farming is a bit less advanced than our own. I don't think they allow "roundup-ready" seeds, for instance."
WHAT? You surely mean less moronic than the ultimate it corporate stupidity that goes under the name of farming in the US?
Muppet!
That's what he said. He just said it in "American English".
Farmers in the U.S. got 154 bushels/acre of corn this year. How did English farmers do?
I got your "Muppet."
Hooray! More high fructose corn syrup (empty calories) in our food!
Is that really the only terms you think in? The quantity they managed to grow?
You think you're "advanced" because you're using GM without even testing it properly? Long term trials?
Yield per acre was meaningful in Ricardo's day, when acreage was a proxy measure of the amount of sunlight falling on the crop, but is it meaningful anymore in an age of fossil-fuel inputs galore?
Nick, your Q is irrelevant , learn about EROEI and that will settle your understanding to the matter.
.... As corn ethanol EROEI is so low (1.3 : 1), in USA .....
e.g use 1 gallon of fuel to get 1.3 gallon of fuel, gain is only 0.3 gallon. Seems like a win-win on paper, but in reality there is just alot of "arms & legs" with little gain when the counting is finished.
Google EROEI or search TOD for more.
Do not believe EROEI or net energy analysis. It is false.
It is false on several levels, but the main one is logic. When the energy inputs and outputs are different, they can not be compared. This is what EROEI tries to do. Different energy forms have very different utility, characteristics, price and availability. EROEI ignores all these.
Besides energy is an undefined abstraction just like grain or metal for example. EROEI postulates that the value of the concrete, i.e. ethanol, can me measured by the the abstract. This is preposterous. It is like saying we can decide which form of grain to grow based on grain return on grain invested. Or which metal to mine based on metal return on metal invested.
Net energy is just an extrapolation of the falacious EROEI concept. It is also false for similar reasons.
In any case generic energy is not limited. A new supply arrives from the sun each day. And energy forms like gravity and geothermal are unlimited for all practical purposes. Why then should we care about the generic energy return on generic energy invested?
We should not. The problem is Peak Oil and the liquid fuel energy form used for transport. That is the solution we should be looking for.
EROEI is a distraction and solves nothing.
Whoa, whoa, whoa!! I was reading along, minding my own business, watching you farmers duke it out, not intending to say anything, because I don't know alfafa from an alpaca. But you went just a tad too far there.
Physics crumbles in face of your assertion, hundreds of years of it. True, better to have physics crumble than agriculture. Still, it deserves a little respect, Newton with his apple, Einstein with his baggy pants, and all that.
It's also true that it is very hard to give a definition of energy that isn't a wee bit circular. But this is true of any fundamental concept in physics. And it is definitely an abstraction. Nevertheless, one of the great accomplishments of physics is the idea of energy and in particular its conservation. This puts definite limits on what can happen.
Yes, it does. Energy is like money at a bank (ok, this used to be a good analogy) -- it has to add up. Behind all the different forms of energy, there is a quantity (call it abstract if you want), so they can be compared in that respect, and it sets limits on what can happen. Energy must be quantitatively conserved. There have not yet been any exceptions found, not anywhere, except in quantum mechanics, and there only in the very shortest intervals of time, where energy can sort of be borrowed as long as it is paid back right away (I won't mention banks again).
Indeed you are right. Maybe it would help to define units of measurable energy.
Calories.
Joules.
BTU (british thermal unit).
These are all very measurable and very real.
Keep on trying, I'm with you. Just don't TOUCH his subsidies!
You wouldn't happen to be an economist, would you?
I must not know how to calculate. Maybe you can help me out.
I use 5 gallons of diesel to raise 154 bushels of corn (plus 2,700 lbs of DDGS. This means I've used 5 gallons of diesel, and .6 of my acre to produce 450 gallons of ethanol.
Union Pacific uses 1 gal of Diesel to ship 100 gallons of ethanol 1,200 miles (about the "average" distance.)
My Question: How many gallons of diesel did I use to produce a gallon of ethanol?
kdolliso,
That's awfully far from statements from Robert Rapier, or the sources on which he relied, of .2 gallons of diesel to produce a gallon of ethanol. Where does the big difference come from? If he's wrong, how did he make such a big mistake?
More than you're implying because you left out bringing in seed and fertilizer, and hauling the corn to the distillery.
You're also leaving out the energy used at the ethanol plant and the fertilizer plant. I grant that neither is diesel, but both could be if fed through a GTL or CTL plant.
" bringing in seed and fertilizer, and hauling the corn to the distillery."
So you're talking about the transportation costs for these? It really doesn't sound like much, given that a truck can haul 40 tons of these things for 7 miles per gallon: that's only 1 gallon to haul 5,000 pounds for a hundred miles. That sounds like less than the fuel needed to take the ethanol 1,000 miles to market.
Could you quantify that, say, per gallon of ethanol? It would be nice to actually get a handle on these things.
Figure 3 gallons of ethanol from every bushel of corn. It's close enough for guvment work.
Now, really, I gotta admit, the 5 gal/acre is a little optimistic. That's the number for the notill/lowtill guys. About 40% of corn is still raised the old way which uses about 8 gal/acre. So, really, I should have used something like 6.5 gal/acre; but the difference in the final total is so small I didn't bother breaking out the calculator. Plus, the movement is rapidly to the notill/lowtill direction; just like the movement in the refineries is toward burning the cobs, or other biomass rather than nat gas.
"I should have used something like 6.5 gal/acre;"
And does that include the "bringing in seed and fertilizer, and hauling the corn to the distillery", or is it just the diesel used on the farm?
I'm tried to put together something reasonably complete and mildly authoritative...
Nick, that would be "on the farm." You are on the right track with your numbers for transporting the seed. That's why I put up the 3 gal/bu number.
"You are on the right track with your numbers for transporting the seed. That's why I put up the 3 gal/bu number."
Ah, I'm not quite following you. Do you mean transporting corn?
Ok, to nail down this small detail: roughly how many pounds of seed and fertilizer (and any other bulk supplies you can think of) would be needed per acre?
Yes, Corn.
I make that goofy juxtaposition all the time. Danged if I know why.
I no longer remember how many seeds per acre, but it's very minor from an energy standpoint.
So, 56 lb/corn bushel, and 3 gallons ethanol per corn bushel, so 18.7 lb/gallon of ethanol.
1 gallon diesel to haul 5,000 pounds gives 1 gallon diesel to 267 gallons of ethanol, or .4 gallons diesel per 100 gallons of ethanol.
If we add farming operations consumption of 6.5 gallons of diesel per acre and 450 gallons of ethanol per acre, we get 1.4 per 100 for farm diesel.
We've got 1 gallon of diesel to move 100 gallons of ethanol 1,200 miles by rail.
That gives a total of 2.8 gallons of diesel per 100 gallons of ethanol. If we assume 1.38 gallons of diesel per gallon of ethanol, we get 3.9 gallons of liquid fuel input per 100 gallon of output.
Anybody have any comments on this??
Looks like reasonable numbers to me, Nick. Good Luck with your Study.
1) You should probably also include the energy cost of irrigation pumps wtc. in areas where irrigation is required to grow corn. Even if your own farm uses no irrigation to supply the local ethanol plant, the fact your corn is withdrawn from the food / feed market means someone out in Nebraska who needs irrigation will have to grow the corn for that market.
2) What about crop drying the corn? Does the corn that goes into ethanol production usually get moisture controlled first?
Only about 4% of the corn used for ethanol is irrigated, Lengould.
And, Here's the Kicker. We're producing more corn, and more ethanol; but we're farming fewer acres.
http://www.mncorn.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=166:b...
I guess the "drying thing" would depend, somewhat, on the time of they year. X needs to address that. He's right up there in the middle of the whole corn/ethanol thing.
I hadn't seen the energy costs of alcohol production in this thread, especially distillation.
That's because I started this thread by asking about diesel inputs. I was curious about liquid-fuel return on liquid-fuel investment. The thread really started with Rembrandt's charts on liquid fuels that include biofuels, and a question about whether those biofuels should be adjusted for liquid fuel inputs.
Distillation energy would come from natural gas (or cobs, or coal, unfortunately).
What did you think of my summary of liquid fuel inputs?
It sounds like you used 5 gallons of diesel (plus land) to raise 154 bushels of corn.
But it takes a lot of energy to take corn and distil it to ethanol doesn't it?
There's some numbers on EROEI for ethanol production here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel#Energy_balance
Canadapeaker, the average new plant will use about 25,000 btus of nat gas and about IIRC a half a kwh of electricity in the production of a gallon of ethanol.
Many are starting to move toward burning the corn cobs for process energy. Also, the plants are becoming more efficient, monthly, in the distillation process. The amount of energy used is dropping, constantly.
Also, and this goes toward X's argument, I feel a gallon of ethanol should be credited with 100,000 btus, in that that is about the amount of work it can do in the average modern engine as compared to gasoline, the fuel it replaces.
I know this will create a firestorm, but you have to consider Octane, as well as btus, when comparing fuels for an IC engine. BTU's are only "half the story."
Also, Frank brings up a good point. You need to include about 6,000 btus of nat gas in the fertilizer for every gallon of ethanol.
Edit: Although, 2,400 of those BTU's should be charged off toward the DDGS. Which would leave about 3,600 BTUs/gal.
I'm afraid I don't understand how you can consider Octane, C8H18 (a compound) with BTUs (a unit of energy)?
CP, I should have referred to OCTANE RATING.
Ethanol has an extremely high "Octane Rating," (about 114 AKI) thus can undergo insane levels of "Compression," thus yielding great amounts of horsepower (that thing that, actually, really, does "Work."
Edit: For instance, THIS CAR picks up an astonishing 212 hp when using E85 vs 95 Octane gasoline.
Hi kdolliso - thanks for the figures and the links. If you still check this thread please can you check the estimates below:
From the MCGA page I get 2007 total figures of 679million gallons from 250million bushels = 2.72gall/bushel = approx the 3gall/bushel you mentioned. I didn't see a figure just for corn production but it gives approx 15m acres for corn and soya so if we take your 150 bushels/acre and the 250m bushels figure that gives about 1.6m acres req. for ethanol = over 10% of the land in prod. for corn and soya. Am I on the right track here?
If we take avg US annual car mileage at 12500miles and avg consumption of 25mpg the avg. fuel use/annum per car = 500gallons. So at the current 2.72 gall/bushel and the 150 bushel/acre rate that gives approx 400gall/acre. So each car needs 1.25 acres if it running on ethanol from corn. Quick google suggests 250m registered cars in the US so say 300million acres if all those cars are in use at avg. mileage and mpg rates. The MCGA page gives total US ag land at 900m acres so approx 1/3 of this could be needed to produce the ethanol req. for a total fleet switch with no other measures taken. This is also approx 200 times the 1.6m acres estimated above in current ethanol prod. - how would this affect food production?
Re: the 1000bhp CCXR - amazing technology but IMO really sad to see something so out of step with any useful needs. What is US speed limit? If this level of skill and sophistication went into fuel econeomy then maybe ethanol would have a chance of running maybe 3 cars/acre at 100mpg.
Re: x and his EROIE views - for interest did a quick check on the sums and I make it incoming solar per year/acre = approx 24hrs*3600secs*365days*180W/m2(avged for 24hrs over the year)*4000m2 = 22e12J vs. out going ethanol of 400gall*90MJ/gallon = 36e9J. I make that approx 0.15% EOut/EIn. For comparison production solar PV is approx 15% efficient EOut/Ein so 100 times better. So with elec vehicles it would be getting towards 300 cars/acre at eq. elec consumption of 100mpg.
Lots of detail missed above but FWIW my view is ethanol has something to offer in the short term but long term we need more radical changes. Whilst I type the radio is covering the current collapse of the european car industry - like the US situation it is not pretty.
Please check the figures above - sorry if I've made any bobos, all back of an envelope stuff.
"The MCGA page gives total US ag land at 900m acres "
I'm puzzled by that - I've always seen numbers around 300M.
Hi Nick - from kdolliso's link to the Minnesota Corn Growers Assn. page:
"The 2007 Agriculture Census shows a dramatic drop in ag land usage between 2002 and 2007. The total land in farms in the United States dropped from 938,279,056 acres in 2002 down to 922,095,840 acres, or a loss of more than 16 million acres in US agriculture. Land use in Minnesota reflects the same trend: a drop from 27,512,270 acres in farms down to 26,917,962 acres, or a loss of more than 500,000 acres from farming. That’s a two percent drop in Minnesota farmland at the same time that Minnesota’s ethanol production was more than doubling".
The other figures I used are sourced from that page (worth a look), kdolliso's figures and quick google checks. Another check worth doing would be comparison to the gross US oil for transport figures:
From http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/hist/mgfupus1m.htm I get approx 275e6 barrels/month gasoline product supplied. This gives approx. 275e6b/month*12month*42gall/b = approx 140e9 gallon/annum. So divide by 400gallon/acre gives approx. 350million acres req. to replace gasoline with ethanol.
EDIT - should have clarified my first comment above: I think the MCGA page reference to corn and soya land use is for Minnesota.