Developing the Seedster. I'm Greg Martin as Line On Agriculture presents the Harvest Clean Energy Report.
Developing clean energy technologies requires a certain amount of infrastructure. That has been part of the slow march towards renewable energy. Everything from the harvesting of the bio crops to the pumps that dispense the bio fuels to the engine that burns them all need to be either invented or redesigned. Lee Arbuckle is one of those guys. He is the owner of Native Seedsters and has developed the Seedster, a seed harvester designed to harvest seeds from plants that are generally difficult to harvest from.
ARBUCKLE: Well on energy specifically we've got a lot of possibilities. Biomass sources are miscanthus, switchgrass, then there's Indian grass and then there's big blue stem; we harvest all four very effectively. When you have a seed head that's up 6, 8, 10 feet up in the air its not every piece of equipment that can get up there, right? So our concept up putting this on a loader that mounts on a tractor and has a brush and comb.
The brush and comb work together in counter rotation to strip or pluck the seed from the plant and hold it in a bin.
ARBUCKLE: And out shaping of equipment is so that seed head of different heights can be treated more or less in an equivalent fashion. So those four species are challenging for a combine and we do all of them well. We're hoping to break through. We have sold 9 machines.
In May 2008, NSI was awarded a USDA SBIR grant to test the feasibility of Seedster technology to harvest two other promising sources of feedstock for biofuel, the oilseeds camelina and canola.
ARBUCKLE: About 550-600 people will present an idea to USDA that can fall in any number of categories and if they find that that's a novel idea they'll pick about 1 out of 7 of those and give them funding for phase one and phase one is a proof of concept. Is it technically possible to do what this innovative idea or this research idea and preferably both research and innovation are involved in this 6-month grant.
Visit their website at nativeseedsters.net and for additional information on clean energy, visit harvestcleanenergy.org. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.
www.harvestcleanenergy.org
www.nativeseedsters.net
