Terra Daily: This spring farmers responded to the ethanol industry's demand for grain by increasing their corn acreage by 19 percent over last year, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates. What if that happens again next year? What if farmers decide against crop rotations and plant corn on the same fields, year after year? Or, what if farmers begin growing biomass crops such as switchgrass for the production of ethanol from plant fiber? Will soil lose fertility? Will erosion increase? Will the amount of energy needed to produce biofuels go up or down? Will farm income increase or decrease? Will the bioeconomy be sustainable?
Robert Anex, an Iowa State associate professor of agricultural and biosystems engineering and associate director of Iowa State's Office of Biorenewables Programs, is working to answer those and other questions about the transition to an agriculture that produces biomass as well as food and fiber….
"It may well be that the development of biomass-based crops production systems can have as profound an impact on agriculture and its environmental footprint as it does on energy security and the global climate," Anex and co-authors Andrew Heggenstaller and Matt Liebman of Iowa State's agronomy department and Lee Lynd and Mark Laser of Dartmouth College wrote in a recent paper. "Whether this is a positive impact or a negative impact will depend largely on how biomass feedstocks are produced and converted, and the extent to which these two activities are integrated."…
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment