U.S. Growers Ready and Able To Grow Biomass Energy Crops

We should think of using human and vegetable organic waste first and continue to use our lands for sustainable uses and growing food. Depleting soils and water for fuel doesn't make sense, especially since there are other options. A field where every fourth row of crops is a solar panel would balance energy and food and water.

Out of control fires are a serious problem during fire season, and harvesting the plants that would otherwise burn in uncontrolled fires for use as biofuel makes a lot of sense.

Remember, this is a Non-Scientific report, it was released by an energy crop company. Who wouldn't want to make money, (probably in government subsidies, from our tax dollars), from their marginal land? If the land is marginal, then it will take more input, (fertilizers, water, etc...),to grow high energy crops for fuel. This is not only inefficient,but bad for the environment. Let's take a Agro-Ecological approach and rehabilitate the land, bring it back into fertility naturally and then plant food crops for human consumption, not for machines. Renewable energy has its place but that place shouldn't be in a farmers field.

The American Farmer is possibly the only out our country has when it comes to fueling our Automobiles.

Electricity is good however we have to burn Coal or Oil to produce Electricity.

If the farmer can see a potential of making a profit he will (as he has in the past) overproduce.

Remember 2 + 2 = 4 Even our politicians know this!

The article states facts. Growers, AKA farmers, would like to have a crop that is easy and cheap to produce. They dream of a life with no more expensive SuperCorn seed, no more irrigation, less tillage, while producing a crop that sells for more than $200/ton.

However, in response we get reiteration of popular myth that the problems of the world are the farmer's fault.

Ironically, some of the most horrible despots alive in politics and business use these myths to promote themselves and denigrate and impoverish working farmers. For a lesson in how this works, look up the methods the Ethyl Corporation used to get most of the nation to favor widescale public Lead and Benzene poisoning over farming for energy crops.

We must remember, when we read oft-repeated notions like these myths about farming, that many of them are also based on paid-for research to spec and propaganda of corporate and political interests.

Growing more food here won't solve world hunger. IN actual fact, the reason there is hunger is that growing food and shipping food costs money. Many nations don't invest in agriculture, they let the UN do that while they invest in weapons.

[Until 2004, China recieved UN food aid, to which the US was the largest contributor. While recieving food aid, China developed the world's largest military, exported weapons and political officers all over the globe, bought missile tech from the Soviets, and stole tech from other nations.]

Why farm when you can steal?

Continued....

Growing more food only means lower prices for large agribusiness and poorer farmers, easily bought out by land speculators and corporate interests that want to diversify into farming.

The weakest political dog in the pack is the farmer. Their strength is votes.

The companies that buy from the farmer and sell to the farmer have much more powerful lobbies, and they control the prices and costs of farming. These parasites are often considered by outsiders to be the voice of the farmers, while the relationship is actually quite parasitic.

Do the major seed and fertilizer companies spend a lot of time researching energy crops? Not much. Just as feed corn has changed drastically over 5,000 years, we could, with our understanding of genetics, breed better strains of grasses like sorghum, canes, switchgrass and bamboo to produce superior energy crops.

The answer is probably not in ethanol, or butanol, but in more flexible options like Mixalco; not in corn or cane but in hybrid grasses that produce starch without irrigation or fertilizer.

The greatest problem is from the voters/consumers of America, who get their opinions from the highest bidder for their attention. There is no major corporate sector now in existence to benefit from a new paradigm.

We could grow energy crops, ones we've never seen before, rather than a surplus of whatever the Agribusiness companies have been buying. We could use those crops to make synthetic fuel far superior to gasoline, maybe even diesel.

We could build car engines that never waste fuel idling, that have no throttling losses, that weigh less. The technology is old, there have even been cars on the market since the mid-1990s with some of these features.

The tragedy is that people [I'm talking to you Prius and Civic drivers, too] don't want to drive like grown-ups, they want to drive like children playing a video game. They don't want to grow food, they don't want to get dirt on their hands.

Your fault.