Posted by zog
on September 11, 2009, 10:24 pm
(I was called on my support for biofuels and using waste biomatter and so on. Here was my rebuttal):
*Some* of that waste ag biomatter is plowed in, but a lot of it is ground up now and used for inexpensive and barely functional alleged "nutritional" bulk roughage in animal feed. They DON'T plow it under in a lot of cases because it is a tradeoff, they found they have less diseases that way, and if you go two years in a row with your big commercial crop and it gets wiped out from diseases and/or pests, etc, sorry, you are now in debt and seriously bankrupt and ain't gonna be farmin no mo.
Right now on this farm, I mean this experiment starts next week with the next flock "right now", we are using a form of really cheap to get waste biomass-sunflower seed hulls- that normally just get more or less tossed into animal feed just to get rid of them or dumped on hillsides for erosion control or something- in an authorized by our upstream company experiment to replace/augment some normally much more expensive and getting harder to get wood shavings we use for absorbent bedding in the poultry houses. It could just as easily go into making ethanol when they get that rough cellulose enzymes and bioreactive agents tech down better (said research going on in dozens of labs right now). Then it very well could be put to fuel use instead, as it would be worth more for that.
Really big farms (such as where we sourced those hulls from) now have gone to "no till", they rarely if ever plow anymore, at most they use a very little fast surface cultivation, and a lot of them don't even do that, they just spray various chemicals and fertilizers and rotate crops. Plant, spray, harvest, do it again. And that's in transition as well, ag industry evolves as it needs to. Now some of the newer tech I like, some I don't, but it is way too varied to comment on in a single thread, and this will be long enough as it is.
Biofuel tech is exploding, it is going in several different directions right now, and a lot of it is quite promising, so I will have to just 100% disagree with your dismissal of biofuels for the future, just to get that out of the way.
Biofuels are quite practical solar fusion power.
These biofuels and solar PV and solar thermal are the ONLY forms of practical fusion power we have now, or are *likely* to have in the next buncha decades given the status of the results of the last several decades on man made fusion power, like with magnetic and plasma and laser whatever gee whizz sci fi containment bubbles and so on.
As such, they really are our best hope right now for developing affordable-enough and sustainable and carbon neutral liquid transportation fuels that can be introduced easily full strength or in blends into our already existing and extremely expensive to replace right now liquid fuel based entire "transportation stack"
. So that's why I disagree with you so much. They *are* working so far, and it shows more promise, and just thousands of dedicated scientists and technicians are working on it to get it better, and it will continue to get better because of that.
Here's an example right now where it is going good and expanding, jatropha seed oil for biodiesel in India. It's just a fast growing weed, it grows readily in scrub land they have there in abundance where you really can't grow anything with any food value, especially if you can't irrigate, yet it thrives in such conditions and has tremendous oil yield and the oil is dang perfect for fuel. As such, continuous harvesting can be considered harvesting "waste biomatter", as the land and plants there where that is growing are of little value right now, except for the jatropha. Every gallon of biodiesel they can squeeze from that, is one less gallon they have to pay for from petroleum sources, it provides a variety of useful jobs in a nation that needs millions more useful jobs, and keeps their economy going better by keeping that cash at home, rather than exporting it to the big oil producers. It's not only working, it's a double economic win for them.
Different areas of the world have a variety of waste ag products that can be used, or new dedicated low maintenance crops for marginal land not in use for food production now, like switch grass, or heck, industrial hemp, a self seeding fast growing huge annual that grows about most anyplace, and has food, fuel, and fiber uses. Here's another, citrus waste. They get the stuff by the cubic mile.. The pulp and peels are definitely not plowed back into the soil, or spread AFAIK, yet they contain oils and sugars that could be used. After processing, what is left over is more concentrated and THAT is useful for adding in as mulch someplace eventually, or perhaps for other uses still to be determined. If you can get your hands on mountains of stuff, SOMEONE will come up with a good use for it eventually, especially in this economy. Because we need the "all of the above" solution right now. 9 billion folks soon, we sure as heck are gonna need a variety of ways to feed and fuel ourselves.
There's tons more out there, look at all that ridiculous let the western US burn up every summer because we have a few lame laws that say you can't harvest all that scrub brush and wood, or even have combo logging and fire control roads into those areas. Double freekiin stupid seekrit cuckoo *nuts*. Controlled logging and brush harvesting could provide a lot of jobs, for a lot of biomatter, useful for fuel, construction (cheaper homes might be a good idea, yes?) and for converting to biochar (which is dang spiffy stuff if you want to get back to plowing the soil once in a great while, only need to do it once a century or so with biochar) to improve soils all over, maybe even bring some deserts back to life. Right now it is truly bio-wasted as they just allow it to burn up all the time. It doesn't save any endangered species, or anything like that, it just burns them poor little critters up as well. No idea how many "spotted owls" have bit the dust in those huge wild fires, got to be more than zero though. No idea how many endangered species of little fish and frogs and lizards and little plants and so on have croaked when their streams silt up after the first heavy rains after a big fire, and the sides of the streams burn up, but it sure has to be more than zero. There's a lot of stupid feel good but junk science laws out there now.
Right now all that wood/cellulose, and the expanding areas with the pine beetle infestations creating even more tinderbox waste biomatter, is more or less going to waste and WILL with *no doubt whatsoever* eventually burn up in huge gigantic wildfires, dumping millions of tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere in a fast time frame, with absolutely ZERO to show for it except wiped out plants and animals and people and buildings and the huge expense to deal with it, when it could be dealt with better in advance and we could get a lot more useful..whatever..stuff from it. Oh ya, I need to mention useful and practical jobs again.
I think we might as well use the stuff and keep expanding the R&D and tech for that "waste and currently wasted biomatter".
Here's a goofy one, the "rain forest" and feel good laws. One-not the only, but one- of the reasons they burn down rainforest and grow crops there is because they put so many restrictions on the sale and export and import of jungle hardwoods. So now instead of that same wood going into good quality wood construction for structures and furniture, it just gets *burnt up*. The people who live in those areas need SOME freekin job, they keep getting told what they are doing is "bad for the environment", so they do something else and THAT becomes bad for the environment..WTF are they supposed to do? It's stupid in a lot of cases and we wind up wasting more resources than we need to based on pure political propaganda with a dubious agenda and some junk science.
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