08/30/07 Alfalfa for cellulosic ethanol?

Farm and Ranch August 30, 2007 A conference was held in Washington D.C. earlier this month hosted by the National Alfalfa & Forage Alliance with the topic, "Bioenergy Systems&Alfalfa the Sleeping Giant." Alliance president Beth Nelson says the purpose of the conference was to promote the benefits of alfalfa as a biomass crop for the production of cellulosic ethanol and to develop an action plant to catalyse research activity into bringing cellulosic ethanol production to commercialization. Nelson: "One of the things that alfalfa has over switch grass for instance, which certainly has a lot of buzz since the president mentioned it in his State of the Union, switch grass doesn't really have an infrastructure. There really isn't an industry for switch grass yet. Certainly one can be developed and can probably play a role in future, but alfalfa does have a very stable infrastructure across the entire country." But what about the economics of using a quality feed like alfalfa for ethanol production? Nelson says that's where research comes in. Nelson; "One of the things we are having our researchers to take a look at is whether or not we would be able to separate the stems from the leaves and still use the leaves as high protein livestock feed source and use the stems for the cellulosic ethanol." Nelson says preliminary research indicates that type of separation could be done, which would make alfalfa use more economical. She says special varieties might also be developed specifically for biofuel production. I'm Bob Hoff and that's the Northwest Farm and Ranch Report on the Northwest Ag Information Network.