Today, it is an experiement, & does not produce more energy per gallon than you use to get there.
It has the _potential_ to produce more ethanol per acre than corn grain does, but that is only a theory today. It is not actual.
They need to come up with better enzymes to make it work more efficiently & more completely.
They feel 5-10 years it should be a _real_ thing with switch grass.
Note that corn stover (leaves, stalks, cobs) can also be used to produce ethanol, if we develop the right enzymes. Then we come back to a lot more ethanol per acre from corn, if we ferment both the grain & the stover.
Several farm magazines have had reports about the infant state of switch grass.
It appears it grows (well yields...) much better in southern USA, so little help to me here in MN.
It is very, very miserable to harvest - this has been a universal statement. No using the beat up old NH square baler to come up with the millions of tons of this stuff needed to fuel a plant. Seems a regular sized plant would need a semi load of switchgrass every 7 minutes 'round the clock. That is a _lot_ of volume....
It is like a summer grass - very hard to establish, miserable actually to get it to grow. Once established tho it is then very persistant.
I like all the media reports that talk about switch grass as if it were a real thing today. It's all theory today, but they hope to get there in a decade or so.
Likewise the sugar cane - Brazil has a lot of rainforest that doesn't treat regular crops very well - disease & fungus & such - but is _perfect_ for growing high-yield sugar cane, so naturally they are way ahead on that - it works there.
Corn is what works in the USA. In a few years, bio-mass from cornstalks, rice, wood waste, and switch grass might work even better.
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Today's Featured Article - A Cautionary Tale - by Ian Minshull. In the early 1950s my father bought an Allis Chalmers B and I used it for all the row crop work with the mangolds and potatoes, rolling and the haymaking on our farm. The farm and the Allis were sold and I have spent a lifetime working on farms throughout the country. I promised myself that one day I would own an Allis. That time event
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