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Article: Switchgrass the New Biograss
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Switchgrass the New Biograss - Jon Radojkovic
In this new world where crops will be used for ethanol and pellets for fuel, what the big buzz word these days is not corn, soy or alfalfa, but switch grass.
"In the very near future our land will have three demands on it," said Clinton area farmer Don Nott. "These will be for food, for biomass (pellets) and for bio-liquid (ethanol)," he surmised.
In the last two years US president George Bush has mentioned, in his State of the Union Address, switch grass as an alternate ethanol fuel source to corn. Many critics agree that corn is too expensive a crop (seed wise and planting costs) to be used for ethanol. They also say producing ethanol from corn requires almost as much energy to produce as it yields while switch grass can produce about five times more energy than you put in.
Switch grass has many other advantages. After planting and establishing the perennial plant, it can be harvested annually for twenty years or longer, takes only a moderate amount of fertilizer and does a far better job of protecting soil, virtually eliminating erosion. Plus it can be used as a dual fuel - as pellets for furnaces or as a bio-fuel for ethanol. Other advantages are is that it's drought resistant and it takes 40 times it weight of CO2, a leading contributor to global warming, out of the air.
"It's going to be a superstar for farmers and great for the environment," said John H Long, an ecologist and proponent of switch grass from Hanover.
The biggest disadvantage is that it takes three years to get a full crop.
Last year Nott planted 65 hectares of switch grass, a plant that bison originally grazed on in the prairies. He plants about nine pounds of seed per acre mixed with oats. In June he will harvest and bale the oats while letting the switch grass continue to grow. He uses the oat crop for pelletizing. The second year there is a partial crop of switch grass and a full crop by the third year. Nott is expecting the switch grass will produce about eight to ten tonnes of mass per hectare while others say it has the potential for up to 16 or even 40 tonnes per hectare. For pellet production, a big advantage is that there are no drying costs for switch grass as with alfalfa, a crop also used for pelletizing, which largely supplies the greenhouse heating industry and rural residential heating needs. Switch grass is left over winter to dry and is harvested in the spring.
"It's a crop that's really starting fly and is getting out of the hands of academics," Long announced.
For Nott, as one of the few farmers to try the new crop, he is confident from all that he has seen, that the crop will be profitable for pellet production. Compared to wood sawdust pellets, which are quite costly because of a lack of sawdust, switch grass and the costs associated with it for a farmer, Nott believes will be profitable."
As a use for ethanol, if the price of switch grass is dependent on corn prices, "It may vary," Nott said. "The problem with corn is if the price go up so does everything else like fertilizer and equipment," he added. "For cash croppers switch grass has the potential to be a long lasting easy crop," Nott says. So far in Canada there are no cellulose energy plants that will convert switch grass to ethanol, but a pilot project is being started in Saskatchewan and quite a few are being built in the USA.
"I think it's a highly suitable crop for the Grey Bruce area," says Long. The crop will grow on marginal soils. In fact Long envisions that switch grass can be planted in small acreage holdings, such as 20 hectares, that are owned by non-farmers, because it's such a long lasting perennial, and could be harvested year after year without needing to be worked up and planted annually.
Even though the pellet furnace market is mainly rural, Nott believes it could be used to produce electricity for urban dwellers such as using the coal fired Nanticoke power plant on Lake Erie.
How much would be needed? Each of the eight units at Nanticoke takes 35 tonnes of coal per hour to operate. For switch grass pellets to be used that would mean about 6,720 tonnes of pellets would be needed per day or 544 hectares worth of farmland. For the whole year about 202,500 hectares of the 3.3 million hectares now in major field crops would be required to be planted in switch grass to supply a major power producer in Ontario. That would amount to about 16 percent of field cropland. Certainly possible and it would also create a demand for the crop, and hopefully some good prices for farmers, which is highly needed.
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