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A little lead on Earthweek holds out the hope that a species of grass could suck lots of CO2 out of the atmosphere and, at the same time, leave prime corn growing land available for corn
New research in the United States may have found a way to use the majority of traditional grain crops for food rather than diverting nearly a quarter of them for biofuel production.
A team from the University of Illinois says the giant perennial grass Miscanthus x giganteus can produce far more biofuels per acre than current sources, such as corn.
To achieve the current White House goal of offsetting 20 percent of gasoline use with ethanol would take about a quarter of all U.S. cropland out of food production, the researchers say.
Writing in the journal Global Change Biology, crop sciences professor Stephen P. Long said that Miscanthus can be grown on land unsuitable for growing corn or other grains, meaning that acreage used for those crops could be once again allocated exclusively for food production.
A few problems spring to mind: 1) pricing. If a farmer can get more for growing the grass than for growing corn, then grass it will be — corn land or not. 2) “Exotic species” syndrome. We’ve seen a lot of this lately, in which a species — of plant, shellfish, bird– is introduced into a niche it didn’t evolve in. In some cases the introduced species will not survive. In others, not only does it survive but it thrives, and gobbles up the land, food, water needed by existing species, driving them to extinction. Even under well meaning proposals this is a threat which needs to be fully understood before rising for the standing ovation.
In a related piece, Steve Lawrence of AP writes of the re-introduction of tules and cattails into the Sacramento delta. The driving idea is that the islands in the delta which have been farmed and have been submerging into the river bottom for over 100 years need to be built back up. Tule and cattails are what created them if the first place, so why not return some to their original state and let nature take its course. As an added benefit, the two reeds are excellent CO2 captors.
“All that soil out there are plants that grew 6,000 years ago and didn’t decompose completely,” said Robin Miller, a biogeochemist with the Geological Survey. “That’s what peat is. So we’re just making the same thing happen that happened here for millennia.”
About 2 1/2 years ago, scientists noticed that their “big garden,” as Miller calls it, was removing carbon dioxide, one of the greenhouse gases blamed for global warming.
“We were capturing a lot of (carbon dioxide) at levels much greater than other systems — marshes and forests, grasslands,” said Roger Fujii, the project’s director and the bay-delta program chief for the Geological Survey’s California Water Science Center.
That revelation persuaded state and federal officials to expand the project. They are now trying to determine whether the tules and cattails could be used to combat global warming through what they call “carbon-capture” farming.
Under that scenario, companies could meet state greenhouse gas limits by paying delta farmers to plant tules and cattails rather than row crops.
“They can just sit back and watch the tules grow, and they should be making money,” Fujii said. “That’s what the vision is. It’s not to do it just on Twitchell Island. It’s to see if we can do it throughout the delta on subsided land.”
There are problems, however, that need investigating. How much methane is produced? Nitrous oxide?