Alex Tiller's Blog on Agriculture & Farming

Algae Farming Continued, Thoughts from an Expert

I have a treat for all of you that expressed an interest in my Algae Farming piece from June 9, 2008. 

Mark Edwards, a professor at Arizona State University, has provided us with his speaker notes on Green Algae Strategy: Engineer Sustainable Food and Biofuels which summarizes his many years of research on algae production for food, fuel and other coproducts and solutions.  Mark said, “Algae is not a silver bullet for energy independence and I say in paragraph #2 that energy solutions will be a suite of renewables.  I believe algae present an important piece in the energy and food puzzle.  Algae will play a pivotal role in liquid transportation fuels.”

I have reviewed Marks materials and while I can’t say I agree with all of his comments, (example: “End Subsidies Now!”) I can tell you that he has provided some thought provoking research that has truly opened my eyes to the raw potential that algae provides.  His research is extensive, robust, and comprehensive and deserves further consideration by all of us. 

I have provided links to four (4) PDF documents below.  Please check them out. 

Speaker Notes: http://alextiller.com/agribusiness_resource/green_algae_strategy_paper.pdf

Additional Information:

http://alextiller.com/agribusiness_resource/green_algae_supplemental_1.pdf

http://alextiller.com/agribusiness_resource/green_algae_supplemental_2.pdf

http://alextiller.com/agribusiness_resource/mark_edwards_speaker_brief_2008.pdf

If you like Mark’s work or want to learn more, he also has a book called Green Algae Strategy available for purchase on Amazon.

Farming Alternative Fuels

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!

Where’s the Beef? Nebraska State Beef Industry Impacted by Poor Name Choice

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

Water – 80% to 90% of Global Freshwater Used for Irrigation; Sustainable?

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.

Sharing Some News: Willie Nelson Concert in Denver to help Darfur

I know this is kind of a local topic, but some of my friends over at Project C.U.R.E. and Denver for Darfur asked me to let you all know about an upcoming concert here in Colorado.  It sounds like a lot of fun and I am disappointed that I won’t be in town to attend. –But that doesn’t stop you from going, helping a great cause, and meeting Willie Nelson in person!  Here are the details:

WILLIE NELSON TO MEET WITH FOUR LUCKY FANS AS PART OF

VIP PRE-CONCERT RECEPTION TO BENEFIT DARFUR 

Meeting With Fans Part of August 26^th Event at Red Rocks Attended by “DARFUR NOW” Star Adam Sterling 

DENVER – Denver for Darfur and local nonprofit Project C.U.R.E. announced today that Willie Nelson has invited four people onto his tour bus for an exclusive private meeting with the star prior to his concert at Red Rocks on Tuesday, August 26.  The offer comes as part of a VIP pre-show event that Adam Sterling, a star of the movie DARFUR NOW, will attend to help raise funds to send a container filled with $400,000 worth of donated medical supplies to clinics and hospitals in the Darfur region of Sudan. 

“This is a once in a life-time chance for fans to meet with the legend himself on his private tour bus,” said Jeff Bridges, spokesman for Denver for Darfur.  “Mr. Nelson has once again shown he’s a true class act with his generosity to our cause, and we deeply appreciate the work done by Chuck Morris at AEG Live to make this happen.  We’re also delighted that Adam Sterling, one of the stars of the movie DARFUR NOW, will join us at the VIP reception.” 

While Nelson will not attend the pre-show VIP event, a premium sponsor of the event will receive two spots on his tour bus, and the other two spots will go to the winner of a drawing held during the event.  Tickets to the pre-show VIP event cost $250 and include entry into the drawing, as well as food, drinks, and premium seats for the concert. 

Tickets for the event, which will take place between 5:30-7:30pm at the Red Rocks Visitors Center, are available online at www.denverfordarfur.org.  Companies or individuals interested in sponsoring the event and securing two spots on the tour bus can contact Brittany Morris at 303-592-5458. 

The nonpartisan event is open to the public and also features entertainment by musician Nina Storey and a silent auction with several art pieces by Ronnie Wood from the Rolling Stones, courtesy of Fascination Street Fine Art Galleries.  Sterling will attend the VIP reception to discuss the horrific situation in Darfur and ways that individuals around the globe can help make a difference.  At 24 years old, Sterling successfully passed a bill in California to keep all state funds out of Sudan. 

“With the tragedies in Darfur it is easy to feel helpless and removed from the situation,” said Project C.U.R.E. President and CEO Dr. Douglas Jackson.  “This event allows individuals and communities the opportunity to make a direct difference in the lives of people in this beleaguered and war-torn part of the world.” 

Support for Ethanol (Not just Corn)

After my last post, let’s get back onto dry land where we can get some farming done. We know that we need to move to an alcohol economy so that we can grow our own fuel instead of being dependent on hostile foreign countries for it. That’s a multi-step process. It would be great if we could just turn a valve somewhere in Missouri and have a billion barrels of ethanol come flowing out, but it doesn’t work that way. We have to develop the ability to make alcohol-based fuels, like ethanol, in economical and environmentally sustainable ways. We also have to give the transportation and heating infrastructure time to adapt to the changing fuel base of the country. A trillion barrels of ethanol does us no good if there are no cars that can burn it; right now we scrape by with adding a bit of ethanol into regular gasoline so that engines can burn it, but the millions of ethanol-friendly cars we need simply aren’t on the road yet. They can’t get on the road without a fuel base already in existence. Corn-based ethanol is the first step on a stairway that leads upwards to fuel independence for our country; it isn’t the whole stairway.

Bad press about the deficiencies of ethanol – some real, some exaggerated, and some just plain invented – has caused some people to sour on the concept of alcohol fuels. This is just wrong; it would be like deciding that basketball is a terrible sport because certain players behaved badly in their hotel rooms after the game. Corn-based ethanol will not be the salvation of our fuel economy, but it will be the first step in developing the cellulosic ethanol technologies that can save us.

Cellulosic ethanol is the production of an alcohol fuel from cellulose. Unlike current ethanol technologies, which requite a very high grade of organic product as feedstock, cellulosic ethanol can use really terrible plants (otherwise useless) and organic matter – stuff that farmers pay to have hauled away from the fields after harvest, it’s so useless at the moment. Cellulosic ethanol can also be created from old phone books, sawmill/paper mill and cotton gin byproducts, lawn clippings and all the fruits and vegetables that your grocer throws away after they expire. (–think flux capacitor from the 80’s movie Back to the Future)  The waste-to-energy potential alone of cellulosic ethanol is staggering – and that’s just using the stuff that we throw away now. Crops formulated for cellulosic ethanol potential, like switchgrass and miscanthus, actually have far more energy per acre than our current corn-based feedstock. Even preliminary test results are impressive. It would take 25% of US cropland converted to corn in order to produce enough conventional ethanol to meet 20% of US energy needs, but only about 9% of cropland planted with miscanthus – a 250% improvement over the yield from corn. And unlike corn, miscanthus is very tolerant of poor soil and weather conditions – it doesn’t need to be planted on prime agricultural land. We can grow it on garbage land that would otherwise simply be barren – expanding the farm economy, rather than just redirecting part of its output into energy.

Cellulosic production is not economically feasible at the moment – but it is getting better every year. The existence of an ethanol economy based on corn is providing the driver for research and development into cellulosic ethanol, because companies, individuals and entrepreneurs can see that there is a market for their product if they can get the processes working. Like the sailing ship economy, corn-based ethanol provides a structure for the development of new and better technologies – technologies that wouldn’t be developed in a vacuum.

Corn won’t get us to the finish line, but we need it in order to get off the starting line.

What does Corn have in Common with a Sailing Clipper? – Sounds like the start of a joke…

I’ve been getting a lot of good comments on an earlier post about the viability of ethanol fuel. Many commenters seem to feel that corn-based ethanol is not a realistic long-term solution to our fuel problems, and it always seems to surprise them when I acknowledge that in fact, that’s true.

Corn-based ethanol cannot possibly become the primary, or even a primary, fuel source in the United States. The reason is obvious: even if we took every acre of arable land that wasn’t absolutely required for food production and planted corn on it wall-to-wall, the amount of fuel that would be produced would only be a fairly small fraction of the fuel we use. There just isn’t enough available land; plant-based fuels are relatively low in energy density and so you need a lot of plant feedstock to make a gallon of good fuel.

Why, then, should we be pursuing corn-based ethanol? The answer is simple: it is a bridge to an alcohol economy. Bob Zubrin’s excellent book “Energy Victory” lays out the case for transitioning the US to an alcohol-based, rather than petroleum-based, economy for our heating and transportation needs. He makes the case far better than I could, so although I won’t promise not to blog about it, I will forego the ten-page lecture for now. The bottom line is that the US can very easily become self-sufficient in fuel if we have an alcohol-based fuel economy, a self-sufficiency that we simply cannot attain with a petroleum economy. We should use our oil to make plastic, and use our staggering agricultural power as the basis for our fuel needs. At the very least, we need an alternative fuel source. 

But wait – didn’t I just say that we can’t do it with corn? Yes, I did. But right now, corn is the feedstock of choice for the ethanol technologies that we have. We have to start somewhere; it’s very difficult for both technological and economic reasons to just declare a full-fledged alcohol economy. The analogy I like to use is the development of oceangoing ships. We started with sailing vessels, which over time became larger, more complex, more powerful, and more capable. Eventually sailing ships became obsolete as wood- and then coal-burning steamships were developed – and for a long time, both sailing ships and steamships plied the same trade lanes. Coal-burners were in turn made obsolete by oil-burning ships, which used the same basic technology but which were much easier to refuel at sea and could go longer distances without refueling. Those ships were in turn made obsolete – although again, there are still plenty of them in the ocean – by nuclear-powered vessels that drew on the power of the atom and never need refueling.

In terms of the alcohol economy, we are at the sailboat stage. We’ve begun to develop the next generation of coal and wood-burners – but we’re still quite dependent on the sailing ships we already have sitting out at the dock. We still have to trade with countries overseas, and we can’t just shut down the trading economy while we wait for the steamships to get better – because the steamships will never get better if there is no trading economy for the researchers to sell into. We go to sea with the ships we have, and we constantly work on making the next generation better.

On Monday I’ll tell you more about why we need corn in order to get to the next stage of ethanol development.

Water – Agriculture and Changing Weather Patterns

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve talked about water and the unique role it plays in a modern agricultural economy. I mentioned how some nations without adequate rainfall have nonetheless developed thriving agriculture sectors, through the use of “fossil water” – water laid down and locked up thousands or even millions of years ago in aquifers - which countries like Saudi Arabia pump to the surface and use to irrigate strategic food crops, such as grain. That era is coming to an end, because the easily accessible aquifers are being drained dry, and fossil water does not replenish itself in the way that the normal water cycle provides.

In the immediate years to come, that’s probably good news for US farmers, because it means that grain and other commodity crop prices will be rising globally, without a parallel rise in American farmers’ cost of production. Irrigation is important to many US farmers, but most of our crops are grown with dryland techniques – they rely on rainfall, not engineered water systems, for the water every crop needs to grow. In addition, the irrigated crops that we do use don’t tend to use fossil groundwater – instead, we bring water from the natural water cycle to a new geographical location.

In the medium and long term, however, US agriculture may be facing a water crisis of epic scale. The reason is our old friend, climate change. Global warming alarmists are fond of claiming a stronger scientific consensus than actually exists, but regardless of the politics and controversies, there has been one constant in the history of weather and climate: it changes. It changes on the short timescale, and it changes on the long timescale. Northern Britain used to be a tropical forest. The Great Plains used to be a glacial tundra. Whether Al Gore is an idiot or a genius is irrelevant: we can predict with 100% certainty that our current climate expectations will be changing.

And unfortunately for many US farmers, one of the most commonly forecast change is a vast reduction in the amount of snowfall over the western United States. Unlike the eastern half of the country, which is well-watered through rainfall, the west relies on the snowpack to even out water flows throughout the year. Snow accumulates all winter, then melts and runs off all through the spring and summer – turning the Colorado River, among other vital arteries, into a huge torrent of water that is used for drinking and irrigation. Even modest warming can have an enormous impact on the west, because modest warming means rain instead of snow – and rain in wintertime does agriculture no good whatsoever absent some means of storing that water until it is needed. Snowpack provided that service for free – we can construct reservoirs, but the quantity of water involved is truly stupendous and so would be the expense.

The results of continued reduction in the snowpack could be very grim for western farming and ranching in general. Most farmers have water rights, entitling them to a certain amount of water from local sources and from rivers like the Colorado. But those water rights will not be worth much if the water isn’t there to fulfill the contract. Climate change could put a serious cramp in western agriculture’s style in the next few decades.

Next week we’ll see how the water problem is likely to affect agriculture worldwide.