3-8 FB Miscanthus 1

 Agriculture could solve so many of the problems in our world if we’d just pull our heads out of…the ground. I’m DS.

I don’t know if this is a political speech or an ag report.

T. Boone Pickens says that the greatest transfer of wealth in the history of the world has been between the U.S. and oil producing nations. What do we have in America? Lots of land. What can we do with a lot of it? Grow our own fuel, as in miscanthus…not corn. I talked with Dr. Madhu Khanna, a professor of agricultural and consumer economics at U. of I.

“The primary benefit of energy crops are that they are higher yielding. Every acre of land under miscanthus will give you twice as much gallons of fuel as an acre under corn. The other advantage is that it can be grown on land that is not as productive for producing corn or other food and feed crops because it requires other types of inputs, require less water and less fertilizer not as sensitive to soil quality as corn. So it can be grown on land which is marginal, maybe on the fringe of cropland so it doesn’t have as negative an effect on food prices as corn would have.”