06/29/07 Growing Grass for Gas

Growing Grass for Gas. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture. We have been hearing about how farmers can now help to grow us out of our dependence on foreign oil. Right now is an exciting time since there are many different avenues being researched for crops that will provide our growing biofuels industry. WSU-Prosser, Washington's Ag Research Center held their Field Day to show how something as simple as a grass crop can be turned into future fuel. Steve Fransen, Associate Crops Scientist says there are a number of crops being looked at. FRANSEN: Well the ones that we've really been looking at  we started a number of years ago now and have identified a number of ones that I think have real potential and deserve more study and have some  you I think basically we're looking at down the road. What we can do today and what we can do in the future. According to Fransen, the research that is being done is on irrigated crops. FRANSEN: We're just trying to figure out what do these grasses require for growth here in the arid west under irrigation and we're also interested in what is the ethanol yield of those compared to say textbook values that we hear of, so those are some of the things, Greg, that we are working on at this time. Fransen has been very pleasantly surprised by the tonnage results. FRANSEN: The total tonnage on the best switchgrasses in their first year of production was equal to the tonnage on the corn which really surprised me and I was quite pleased to see that. I wasn't expecting that response but that's how the results turned out. Switchgrass takes 3-5 years to reach an adult stage and what they have been working with are juvenile crops. FRANSEN: And so to equal what the corn production was the first year with very juvenile plants  I was most surprised. I wasn't nearly expecting that. I though it would take nearly 2 or 3 years before that's going to occur and we did it in year one. One thing Fransen says they don't have so far is an economic analysis. FRANSEN: We haven't done that kind of economic analysis yet. We've only been working in the West here since about 2001 on these warm season species so we don't have the track record like they do in the Midwest. Tomorrow Steve Fransen talks about the handling of grasses for biofuels. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.