A chief defect of the environmental movement is that it is a movement, a political approach to environmental issues. Problems that need to be analyzed with insight into physical reality are subject to the whims of those having no useful grasp of the issues but who have all manner of ungrounded beliefs. To them, scientific factoids are talking points, ammunition for a virtual war between competing factions and fractions. Entrepreneurs take this as their market reality and pander to the various fantastical notions. Some entrepreneurs are bureaucrats, some are capitalists. Some are both.

Since physical reality plays almost no part in this drama we can find posers who claim to care for the environment who advocate organic agriculture, biofuels, and carbon reduction credits though these things are antithetical. The classic case is the "engineer", "designer", or other politicized urban denizen advocating the use of corn stover for energy production, but the confused notion that there is excess biomass crops up in the most bizarre places.

Can Microbial Ecology Solve The Energy Crisis?

... Two distinct, but complementary approaches will be needed:

The first is to use microbes to convert biomass to useful energy. Different microorganisms can grow without oxygen to take this abundant organic matter and convert it to useful forms of energy such as methane, hydrogen, or even electricity.

The second uses bacteria or algae that can capture sunlight to produce new biomass that can be turned into liquid fuels, like biodiesel, or converted by other microorganisms to useful energy.

There is no abundant biomass for microorganisms to convert from useless to useful forms of energy. There is energy available in the form of sunlight. Assuming that food for the bacteria or algae that can capture sunlight to produce new biomass can be supplied, we might be able to grow biomass for other microorganisms to convert to more useful forms of energy.

But it seems like a Goldberg contraption doesn't it? Here's another: Researchers are seeking ways to make the use of corn stover for energy possible without the environmental destruction that will otherwise occur.

Farmers now leave corn stover on their corn fields to slow wind and water erosion and re-supply the soil with organic material to ensure future productivity.

"The issue is this," said Ken Moore, Iowa State University agronomy professor. "How do you harvest corn stover in a way that sustains the productivity of the environment for producing future corn?"

Just as important as the loss of soil through erosion is the loss of organic material that the removal of the stover would bring.

On an average acre of Iowa farmland, there are roughly four tons of stover. Under the expectations laid out by the USDA, three of those tons would be removed and processed into ethanol. That organic matter that won't be returned to the soil to help future crops grow.

"We know that soil organic matter is critical," said Jeremy Singer of the USDA's National Soil Tilth Laboratory in Ames. "And removing that stover over time is going to decrease the amount of organic matter in the soil. That will lower productivity."

To combat the coming problem, researchers are looking into ways to lower soil erosion while retaining vital organic materials.

"This is a real educational moment," said Singer. "If farmers are going to harvest stover, they have to replace the carbon in the soil."

It isn't just carbon that is lost when stover is removed, it is also mineral nutrients. Those can be imported and applied as fertilizer, along with other major nutrients such as nitrogen, but more of them are required in soil depleted of organic matter. The closer you look at the notion of cellulosic ethanol the worse it looks when you expand the scope of inquiry to include broad environmental perspectives. There is less carbon in the soil, more carbon in the air, more wind and water erosion, more nutrient leaching into ground and surface waters, more fertilizer needed for subsequent crops, and so an increasingly negative net energy balance from operations. The hurrier they go the behinder they get.

One promising solution is the idea of planting a ground cover grass between the rows of corn that remains year-round. This grass would not be harvested.

This ground cover, or living mulch, will perform all the functions that corn stover currently does.

"Imagine," says Moore, "a large flat golf course where you've gone through with a tillage instrument and you've tilled-up every 15 inches. That's what it would look like in farmers' fields."

"The value you get for the production system is that you could harvest as much of the corn stover as you want without having any problems with conservation," said Moore.

"There is a lot of ecological sense to this."

Well, there would be if it worked, but it's a fantasy perpetual motion machine that defies the laws of physics and biology.

"Corn is not a very competitive species particularly early in the season," said Kendall Lamkey, professor and chair of Iowa State University's agronomy department. "Corn doesn't like to be growing with anything else in the field."

But later in the growing season, corn can be a little more hospitable to having neighbors share its space.

By the time the corn plant is five inches tall, the kernel number on the corn plant is already determined. That is a measure of the plant's potential yield, said Lamkey.

Stress early in the growing season can affect yield greatly, he said.

While this research has just begun, Moore says that this idea is not new.

"Nature does this all the time," he said. "You see prairies that have these complementary mixtures of multiple species that grow and share space. In a way we are sort of simulating the grassland systems that were originally here, but in very simple way."

Prairie polycultures work because the species don't compete directly, and most of them are perennials that don't have to start from seed each year under intense competition from established occupants. They exploit different parts of the ecosystem. For example some are shallow rooted and some are deep rooted. Looking at the surface with the plants growing side by side it isn't apparent that they inhabit separate worlds in a sense, drawing water and nutrients from different places. They compete for air space, sunlight, but they stand on different platforms. They also exploit different seasons, time slicing in a sense, with some doing most of their growing in one season, some in another, and have different metabolisms to match their seasons. For example, some use the C3 pathway which works best in cooler temperatures and some use the C4 pathway which does better with heat. C3 plants are dormant or semi-dormant in hot weather, so they aren't really competing with the C4 plants even though they stand side by side.

There's nothing novel about the idea of planting corn in a sward of grasses. Graziers have done this for years in hopes of providing hot season forage. Corn is a C4 grass. When water and nutrients are abundant it will grow well in hot weather when many pasture grasses have a growth slump. But it doesn't work at all well. Corn is such a needy plant that it doesn't thrive with neighbors. Graziers try to give it an advantage by disking their own pastures before planting the corn. They don't destroy the pasture, they just hurt it bad so that the corn will not have competition at first. That sort of works. The corn doesn't grow and produce a crop, but it puts on some leaf that can be grazed. The disked pasture at least partially recovers while the corn forage grows.

I think that the idea is nuts. They could save the fuel, seed and labor costs and use it to buy some hay and be better off in my view. Feeding the hay out to cattle on pasture would add some organic matter and in effect fertilize their pastures for fall forage production.

The one obstacle that researchers must overcome is the effect on corn yield.

In the current stages of the research, corn yield suffers because of the competition from the ground cover grasses, said Moore.

"Our goal is produce a ground cover that will not interfere or compete with corn production in any way," he said.

Once that problem is solved, the researchers say that using living mulch as ground cover will be an ecologically sound method of keeping a nutrient-rich soil while harvesting stover in the amounts that the USDA predicts.

"I think by the end of the project in two or three more years, I am optimistic that we'll be able to identify the one or two species of grass that we really need to work with for the living mulch," said Lamkey.

"I am also fairly optimistic that we'll be able to identify inbred corn lines that do well in these systems," he said.

That day may not be too far into the future, according to Moore.

"I can envision a day," said Moore, "when smart seed companies are co-developing these packages where they sell ground cover seed and corn hybrids that work in association."

I think that they should be looking at legumes such as clover for their cover crop or inter-crop. They increase soil fertility a bit rather than depleting it as grasses do, and so would mainly compete with corn for water and phosphorus, but not nitrogen.

But I don't think it adds up even if some sort of legume is used. The amount of biomass removed in stover will be greater than that provided by the inter-crop. Soil degradation will only be slowed not stopped, and it will take more water and nutrients to do it that way. I think that they need a better plan.

There is no abundant, excess biomass available for biofuels. If they are to be made in large quantities then the first task is to find ways to produce the extra biomass in ways that do not compete for limited land and water needed for growing food and fiber.

You hear wackos arguing that we have enough food but it isn't well distributed, as if that was a solvable problem. It's not. Distributing food to hungry people, most of which are farmers in remote locations, takes infrastructure, fuel, vehicles and roads that don't exist. It's the "last mile" problem. It may seem cost effective since mass quantities can be moved most of the way to a destination, but it costs as much and more to do the final branching distribution. This is true whether you are moving grain or pixels. And that doesn't consider the economic and political issues.

Worse, it's a static solution to a dynamic problem. Even if physics was repealed and the impossible made possible, it would soon be inadequate since population, and so demand, is rapidly rising. Any way you look at it the problem isn't converting biomass to useful forms of energy, it's producing the biomass in the first place.

The type of solution that seems sensible to me is to develop or find novel microorganisms that thrive in barren places, that need nothing but sunlight, rocks, CO2 and brackish water to directly produce energy in useful forms. It's not clear that this is possible, though there are some claiming that they will synthesize such beasties from scratch in the not too distant future. These machines - nano, bio, whatever - make more sense than trying to steal biomass from existing ecosystems.