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I've chatted at length to Danny Day, Founder of
Eprida
re
Biochar
and I find his stuff seriously interesting. I was thinking that it would be a great way to recycle corn biomass.
I even did a bit of consulting re an Eprida Biochar prototype in Ireland from the point of view of the partnership-based "enterprise model" (ie legal and financial structure) I bang on about here at ET.
The economics of anything wind powered are pretty good conventionally ("bankable", as they say), but not when the wind is "stranded".
I really like the holistic nature of your proposal for "stranded" wind. It would be interesting to see how a "Community Energy Partnership" might look using your model.
Cornstalks are sometimes baled as fodder for cattle, but mostly they're left on the field. The only part we bring in is the kernels themselves. A generation ago the fields were promptly plowed in the winter, disced in the spring, and in general compacted and much abused with fossil fuel driven vehicles. As we've gotten smarter and oil has gotten dearer farmers have gone to low till/no till methods, trying to limit themselves to one pass of prepping, one of planting, and one of harvesting. Reality dictates this to really be four or five passes, but its a dramatic drop from the old days when a dozen passes were the norm.
I would love to think that the situation has changed, because removal of the stalks is exactly why corn is almost as fertilizer-intensive as cotton. Whereabouts is this happening? paul spencer
I'm not talking silage here - post harvest they do sometimes bale the stalks that are left on the field. They're brown and dry at that point, unlike the green cut silage which is produced by, curiously enough, a silage chopper :-)
The fields do end up 5" high - the entire stalk is clipped off by the corn head on the combine, run through the machine to remove the ears, and then the ears are "shelled" - corn kernels go one way, cobs go out the back of the machine along with the stalks.
Does that help?
Actually, the cornstalks should be reintroduced to the soil in order to maintain tilth and soil micro-organisms. Have epistemological model of Complex Information environments. Will Travel.
Last time I was around the process, the newer fiberglass silos showed you which farmer was in hock to his ear lobes; the old steel ones belonged to the farmer who still actually owned the farm. The feedlots used to be just for 'graining' (finishing for market) the beef. Apparently, things have changed. paul spencer
On-farm meat production that is not marketed direct-to-consumer cannot compete against confinement operations. Not so much on price, tho' there is that too, but more on the quantity of meat being shipped and the shipping schedule. As grocery stores moved to a Just-in-Time stocking method they demand specific amounts of meat at specific times with a short sales cycle to keep the capital tied-up in inventory at a minimum. A on-farm operation markets low volume and yearly (cows) or about every 4 months (hogs.) Not enough product at too long intervals.
Grocery store chains ensure their Just-in-Time supply by forward contracting with IBP, usually. (IBP/Tyson purveys to ~40% of the total meat market in the US.) This locks-out the on-farm production from any given area, such as Iowa, as the farm-cycles in a given area coincide. IBP, because they operate nationally, and internationally, is able to 'smooth' the production cycle. As a kicker, the on-farm operation has to sell when the critters are ready for market to clear the area for the next go-round. That means they are always selling when supply is high, from their given area, and price low due to the injection of supply. IBP sells daily and thus captures high prices when supply is low to ride them over the low-price patches.
One side affect is IBP is effectively compounding their ROI daily (!) allowing them tremendous financial advantages.
The above is why I wrote "silage is irrelevant" in my previous post. It doesn't matter what you feed the moo-moos and oink-oinks. Unless the meat is marketed direct to the consumer you can't sell the critters profitably over the long haul. Have epistemological model of Complex Information environments. Will Travel.
Funny thing is that our 'kids' (35 and 32) rather dislike our beef, because it tastes 'gamey' to them. To my wife and I, it tastes like the beef that we used to get before we had chilluns - in other words, the good stuff.
It must be because we live in the Pacific NW, which doesn't have much of a factory meat-production industry, that this is news to me. I knew that it existed, but I had no idea that it was ubiquitous. paul spencer
Don't feel so RvW, I remember when the Kent Valley was mostly dairy farms! :-(
(LOL) Have epistemological model of Complex Information environments. Will Travel.
In a modern EtOH facility, the corn kernels are crunched, then mixed with water and enzymes to convert as much of the starch to sugars as is possible. The sugars get fermented to EtOH and also CO2, which may or may not have any use. Then the mix is filtered via centrifuge, and the filtrate is fed to the stills, where the EtOH is removed. The reboiler grunge is then concentrated via (usually) triple effect evaporators to make a 30 to 35 wt% non-volatiles mix known as syrup (concentrated distillers solids, alias CDS). This contains a lot of oils, fats, complex carbohydrates, vitamins, minerals and especially proteins. In doing so, 1 lb of steam does the work of 4 to 5 lbs of steam by cascading the temperatures of each process - a trick from the oil and chemicals business.
The CDS then usually gets mixed with the filtered solids (Wet Distillers Grains, = WDG) to make WDGS, which is usually dried to 10 wt% water from the ~ 65 wt% to 70 wt% water mush that WDGS is. In some cases it can be used as is, but it gets funky really fast unless used or dried. It's a perfect bacterial growth medium. Most of the nutritive value of the corn is in the WDGS or its dried form, DDGS. This DDGS provides about 20% of the income to the EtOH facility.
As for the rest of the corn, the corn cobs (20 wt% of the corn kernel mass) are essentially all cellulose. The corn stover (stalks, roots, etc) contain most of the minerals in the corn plant, and a lot of the amino acids, as well as a lot of cellulose. These tend to get plowed back into the next crop, though some may be used as silage. If so, after going through the cows or other animals, it gets put back on the farmland.
While this may seem strange, the typical U.S. farmer gets about 50% of their fixed nitrogen from manufactured forms - ammonia, ammonium salts, nitrates and urea. Plants tend to like nitrates best, but they just need fixed nitrogen. The other 50% comes from rotating crops like soybeans (which still need the inorganic boost) with clover and alfalfa, which don't need any inorganic N and do a lot of bacterial N-fixing. The common wisdom seems to be that U.S. farmers are ammonia gluttons, but with the price of ammonia setting records (high natural gas prices, declining value of the dollar, imports now being ~ 70% of ammonia fertilizer used in the U.S. - a huge change in the last 5 years), wasting it is a big money losing prospect. And with the price of corn now reasonable, the high cost of ammonia can be absorbed at present. Of course, this also means that corn prices internationally are not going to be cheap anymore. Ammonia can be 10% of the cost of the corn growing.
If you are looking to find the really intensive ammonia usage, look to Asia, with their intensive rice crops and wheat crops. China is now the world's largest inorganic nitrogen fertilizer consumer.
Nb41
