Not enough sandwiches.

The first annual BioMass conference, attended by biofuels researchers, manufacturers, equipment suppliers, and farmers, is underway here at the Minneapolis Convention Center.

Do you suppose that they have interest?

Yes, he acknowledges, the demand for biofuels derived from traditional food crops like corn has contributed to a rise in global food prices, but so has increasing demand for food from burgeoning populations in China and India.

Clearly those Chinese and Indians need to eat less. No, wait . . .

The large rise of world food prices came after food prices had been either stable or declined for many years. Although incomes in China and India, countries that account for almost 40 percent of the world's population, did grow rapidly during this decade as well as during the 1990's, global consumption of corn, wheat, and rice grew more slowly since 2000 than during the five years earlier.

But continuing, with interest . . .

Nobody plants a pasture of a single species. They put out a variety of grasses, legumes...and so on. They do that because that gives them a higher yield." . . .

Tilman's test plots were "on land that is incredibly unproductive, with very infertile soils... We did not fertilize it, we didn't water. We put out high diversity native prairie, let them grow...." And energy production from the harvest went through the roof. "Another thing which happened which really surprised us is that we have a lot of carbon being stored in those soils."

So, growing inedible biofuel crops on otherwise unproductive farmland not only will ease the current pressure on food crops exerted by biofuels, but will also help remove harmful CO2 from the atmosphere. Seems like a win-win.

hmmm, unproductive yet high yielding pasture? What are these folks smoking? Sounds like good pasture land to me, and if used that way, and managed smartly, it will continuously improve. That's not the case if the yield is harvested and hauled away. Some CO2 may be temporarily sequestered, but the fertility will monotonically decline since the nutrients are being mined. Cropping, no matter what the crop, degrades soil. You must replace what you take away.

There is a way to add another win - The Charcoal Vision: A Win–Win–Win Scenario for Simultaneously Producing Bioenergy, Permanently Sequestering Carbon, while Improving Soil and Water Quality.

Biofuel advocates need to lose the magical thinking. There's no magic crop that will give them high yields on infertile land with no water forever. Sure, polycultures yield better than monocultures, but the yield will decline if fertility is not actively managed - if you extract something you must replace it one way or another.