I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, this is NOT the “alternative fuels” blog. But I keep finding these great information resources about the viability of ethanol and other alcohol fuels, and I really think this is something that is important to farmers. The agriculture sector is already an important player in the energy economy and that trend is gong to get stronger.

A lot of people are a bit at sea about what the new fuels are, and how they’ll work or be produced. I was going to create a summary, but then the nice people at Popular Mechanics went and did it for me. They break out the current research and development into seven basic fuels. I won’t repeat what they say about the various production methods and research breakthroughs that will be needed but I’ll talk about the impact on agriculture and what these fuels mean for farmers.

The first two fuels are our old friend ethanol – cellulosic ethanol, to be specific. PM calls this two different fuels because there are two different ways to make it – one biological, where enzymes “cook” the cellulose into simple sugars, and a gasification method where extremely high temperatures are used to break down the feedstock into synthetic gas. Cellulosic ethanol is likely to be a boon for agriculture because it will use waste material that has no economic value right now. When cellulosic ethanol is viable (probably in the early 2010s) it will mean every farmer has two harvests, one for the primary crop, and another to sweep up the detritus (cornstalks, broken plants, etc.) for shipment to the ethanol plant.

Algal biodiesel is produced by having genetically-modified algae plants convert waste CO2 from CO2-intensive industries like power plants into an oil-like sludge that can then be processed into diesel fuel. This is an exciting technology from the environmental point of view but doesn’t have much impact on farmers, who won’t be producing the CO2 the process requires.

“Green gasoline” is a produced by taking cellulosic feedstocks or sugarcane and using a catalytic reaction to create high-powered hydrocarbon fuel. This one will be good for farmers (especially sugar growers) but like cellulosic ethanol, we have to get the costs of breaking down the cellulosic feedstock into a reasonable range before the economics work.

Biobutanol is a high-energy alcohol fuel derived from sugary feedstock – again, cellulose after we invent some new technologies or sugarcane today – produced by genetically modified microbes that essentially excrete long-chain hydrocarbons. Butanol is a great fuel for current infrastructure because we can use existing pipelines to move it around.

Designer hydrocarbons use simple, tiny organisms which have been genetically modified to turn sugar into fuel. The difference is that with the right genetic engineering, it might be possible to produce fuels chemically identical to the fuels we use today – a big advantage in terms of infrastructure and being able to fuel existing vehicles right out of the vat.

“Fourth generation fuels” is a buzz phrase that essentially just means algal biodiesel, but with additional genetic manipulation. Current algal biodiesel requires a processing phase where the oil-bearing algae are centrifuged or pressed to extract the oil; it should be possible to engineer the organisms to excrete the oil, however, meaning that processing would simply involve skimming off the floating oil from the algae tank.

Environmentally, the algae- and microbe-based fuels are better because we don’t have to use any existing farmland to produce the fuel. Economically, however, those techniques aren’t likely to do the entire job on their own, and crop-based feedstocks will provide the bulk of the energy budget. That will mean better revenue per acre for farmers, as the new fuel techniques will produce a strong and permanent demand both for waste material from food crops, as well as creating new potential for high-energy cellulosic crops like switchgrass. It is an exciting time to be a farmer!

I don’t usually blog about daily news stories here, but I thought I’d make an exception for this Nebraska Beef Ltd. recall that’s currently going on. Just this morning the company recalled another 160,000 pounds of its beef products, bringing the total under recall to 1.36 million pounds. It’s a very serious recall, as the company (after working with USDA) has determined that all this meat was produced under unsafe conditions and poses a Class 1 risk – meaning that the meat poses a serious risk of health impact or even death if consumed.

This is bad news for the affected consumers – at least 30 people have gotten sick so far. It’s worse news for Nebraska Beef Ltd. – and for the state of Nebraska, too. Careless headline writers have made this story look like all Nebraska beef is being recalled – when in fact Nebraska’s beef supply is as safe as ever. This is a problem with one (admittedly large) operation, not a system-wide problem in Nebraska, but you wouldn’t know that from headlines like “Nebraska Beef Recalled”. The American Meat Institute is asking for the press to clarify the situation before more damage is done to the safe meat processors in Nebraska.

That’s not just an idle concern. The beef industry is responsible for fifteen to twenty percent of all the jobs in the state of Nebraska, and the state is the #1 producer of beef in the United States. This recall, large as it is, is only related to a tiny fraction of the beef produced in Nebraska – 7.22 billion pounds last year. (To put it in perspective, if you had a warehouse with 6,000 pounds of beef in it, one pound of that would be beef that has been recalled.)

So, it’s important for us to maintain food safety standards and to hold the agriculture industry responsible for hygiene and safe food handling. At the same time, we have to keep things in perspective, and – especially among segments of the press that are perhaps a little bit undereducated about agriculture and farming – make sure we get all the facts straight before we start another “tomato panic”.

And, perhaps, Nebraska Beef Ltd. needs to look into a name change – one that doesn’t implicate whole states next time you mess up!

Custom 3D Illustration by IDEAVIZ

The global picture for freshwater use is fairly grim. Water supplies, as we discussed previously, are large but finite – and we currently tap pretty much all of the easy and cheap sources for freshwater. A relatively recent paper on the use of freshwater in agriculture around the world puts the blame, if blame is the word, on irrigated agriculture, which worldwide accounts for between 80 and 90 percent of freshwater use. (Abstract here).

Currently, about 1.1 billion people lack adequate access to fresh water, and almost half of the world’s population doesn’t have adequate access to water for sanitary purposes. The impact of this lack of fresh water on disease and health is complex but negative, as you can probably imagine. As incomes rise globally, we can expect a demand for better water conditions from the formerly impoverished citizens of many nations – a demand that is likely to redirect water use from agriculture in the short run, as wealthier people are able to bid up what they are willing to pay for clean drinking and cleaning water and thus outcompete local agricultural sectors.

As farmers around the world are forced to pay more for water, governments and land-use planners are likely to have to shift their priorities for land use, including greater use of naturally-watered land for agriculture. It is unlikely that we are going to see many governments tearing down housing developments in order to return the land to agricultural use, but over time the market will make it economically rational to farm where the water is.

In the long run, it is likely that it will require human intervention into the freshwater system to produce more of a now-scarce resource. Remember we said that water is finite? Well, it is – but it is a finite resource that we can create more of, if we really need to. Except for rarities like the Gulf states, nations which are energy rich and water poor at the same time, nations have “made do” with the freshwater supplies available through nature and a modicum of dam-building, river-rerouting civil engineering. The only way we currently can increase our freshwater supply is to desalinate sea water, which is effectively infinite in quantity. Desalination is enormously expensive in terms of energy, however, meaning that even in situations where freshwater is very difficult to acquire, desalination is, at current prices for fresh water and for energy, an option of last resort.

How expensive is desalination? Some analysts say that it is easier to raise a gallon of water vertically by 2000 meters, or to ship it across 1600 kilometers of terrain, than it is to desalinate a gallon of seawater – the most efficient modern plants can desalinate water for about fifty cents per cubic meter. That sounds cheap – and it is, if you just need a drink of water. If you need a billion cubic meters a day for your agricultural irrigation or for your metropolis, it’s another story.

However, the existence of desalination does mean that water is, over the long term, a problem to be solved rather than a crisis that we do not have a solution for. The difference between a crisis and a problem is that problems usually have known solutions; some problems remain problems because we don’t want to do what’s necessary to fix them. In the case of the water problem, there are solutions, desalination among them – they just require us to do things we don’t really want to do. Next week we will conclude our look at water and agriculture with a review of the possible solutions to the problems we face.

A man with food has many worries, but a hungry man has only one.

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