Re: Buy DANISH!


"Kevin Brooks" <brooksvmi@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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"TOliver" <toliverjrFIX@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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"Keith W" <keithnospam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote

Right now the EU pays farmers to set aside arable land to prevent
food surpluses depressing prices. Here in the UK they are
growing oil bearing plants on some of that set aside land to
be processed into biodiesel.

This is not a future dream, Biodiesel is on sale at Tesco
supermarket filling stations today.

Leonie Smith, Corporate Social Responsibility Manager, Tesco:
"Tesco is pleased to be able to offer its customers a choice of a more
environmentally friendly fuel in Greenergy GlobalDiesel. GlobalDiesel is
also an opportunity for us to demonstrate our own environmental
commitment at corporate level, and for this reason we are trialling the
fuel in our own dot.com delivery vans."

Coming from a family of which one side "farmed" until recent years (and
still "ranches"), I'm still questioning the cost/benefit equation of most
of the "BioDiesel" available today(or likely to be available in the near
future).

As the cost of oil goes up (which it will), the cost/benefit factors for
other energy sources beging looking better and better, if you had not
noticed.

From field prep and maintenance up through fertilizer and other
costs all the way to the fuel requirements necessary for harvesting and
processing the ag-product, the numbers certainly appear to have been
favorably massaged, and noone seems ever ready to 'fess up to an extra
ingredient that inevitably increases cost, that unless you're describing
far better soils than most farmers will ever have access to, no crop,
oil-bearing or fermentable for distillation, can be farmed year in and
year out.

Huh? You might want to tell that nugget to the farmer who owns the land
that backs up to our house lot, 'cause he sure seems to put crops into
that piece of land each and every year. It is, with the exception of the
worst winter months, used for successive crops of winter wheat, hay, and
corn. My dad has been raising orchard grass and clover on his land for
decades. You know something the rest of us pseudo-farmboys don't? The
advent of industrially produced fertilizers has changed farming a wee bit
over the past sixty or so years, if you missed it.

Brooks

You do understand how much petroleum goes into those fertilizers to which
you've referred? That anhydrous is not guano scrapings these days. Using
petroleum to make fertilizer to grow biomass (just as we use petroleum to
fertilize corn to make ethanol) simply doesn't compute in any long term
economic perspective

You do comprehend, something that seems to come slowly on occasion, that
your neighbor's fertilizer costs are likely to outweigh the modest price
"Biomass" for conversion to biodiesel may bring. Even now, the only
"profit" from ethanol comes from the enormous tax advantages accorded its
distillers. Orchard grass and clover are hardly commodities likely to be
profitable crops for sale as biomass, and their value for grazing or sale as
forage outweighs other uses. Crop-framing is an equation in which a number
of factors determine the crop selection. Some are worth pouring substantial
fertilizer, herbicides and pesticides (and in many cases expensive to pump
artesian water) to insure high yield and the ability to grow the same crops
each year. Others, in much of the country, are a now and again proposition.
Few US farmers would grow cotton were it not for the cottonseed. Who would
grow tobacco without the subsidy. Cropping biomass is simply not yet cost
beneficial for most US farmers, even less valuable than your dad's forage.
Right now, I've got a drought-ridden pasture only capable of carrying with
purchased hay about 5 pairs on a 100 acres, hardly economic, but still far
more valuable than trying to shred and bale to sell the meager pasturage as
biomass. It's not just people (or truck tanks) that have an appetitie for
food or biomass. All that beef, pork, chicken, lamb, turkey, and farm
raised critters from catfish to salmon, steelhead, crawfish, shrimp you eat
come after a large infusion of feed grown by farmers unlikely to convert to
biomass cropping.


Biomass to be economical has to come from land essentially to "poor" or
otherwise unsuitable to be used for more valuable purpose or output. I
guess the USArmy could run a pilot conversion program, converting Fort
Hood's "evergreens" to distillate to run M1A1s and Bradleys....


.

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