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Little River, TX | This is not a new concept, not at all. Roughly 15 years ago in Minnesota there was a pilot project to burn alfalfa stems in a generation plant. The idea was to grow alfalfa in a new area, at the facility shatter the leaves off for leaf meal and burn the stems in a turbine.
What do you think the large hay producers in the irrigated west are doing? They harvest the entire plant and ship it off to Dairy Country, confinement dairies. Then those confinement faculties must find a place to use all that animal waste.
For a more efficient use of the land, as well as the manure, if grazing were used to harvest the forages the manure would be left on the land, it requires less transportation to move animals, carcases, and/or milk. How much of the nutrients are returned to a cabbage field? After all what we are harvesting is protein, carbohydrates and a little mineral.
There is more to agriculture than corn and beans. There is another minority who insist our concentrate fed animal system is a waste of valuable resources.
What we, the civilized world, is contemplating is to return to a industrial subsidence system. In the days of my Grandfather all the fuel was produced on the farm. A percentage of the production went to the work animals. Fires, for warmth and cooking, were started using crop residue, and then wood from the wood lot. | |
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Broin to convert Iowa plant to Biomass
