Category: Biofuels

On the one hand, there’s a good chance that the rush to biofuels will create conflict, especially in developing countries. Indeed, according to Gristmill it is already happening in places like West Kalimantan, in Indonesia, “where the rush to plant palm-oil plantations is generating conflict with Indonesians who grow rubber trees and other crops on their small plots of land”. And on the other, scientists are helping turn biodiesel into a “proper” industry, with profitable by-products that make the whole enterprise more profitable. The New York Times reports on USDA researchers who are exploring ways to make use of the waste products of biodiesel, including some with horticultural applications.

Many intensive farmers — and most gardeners — use diversity in time to improve their harvests. They change the crop growing on a particular piece of land from year to year. Legumes add nitrogen to the soil, which the following crop, perhaps a cereal, uses up. That’s the simplest rotation, and soybean-maize covers vast swathes of land. But with the increasing unpredictability of conditions, more complex systems may be more beneficial. Indeed, recent research suggests that a dynamic rotation, which draws on a larger selection of crop diversity and which changes the exact pattern of rotation depending on recent past events, may be the best option yet.

A symposium in 2005 heard reports from USDA scientists who had conducted experiments in dynamic cropping; that symposium has now been published in Agronomy Journal. Access is restricted, so I’m glad that Biopact has quite a detailed analysis, even though I cannot discover from its web site who is behind Biopact.