by Subjectivist » Thu 09 Jul 2020, 22:34:08
vtsnowedin wrote:Subjectivist wrote:vtsnowedin wrote:At 147 bushels per acre and 2.8 gallons of ethanol per bushel of corn, corn wins on the biofuel front. But even if we turned every bushel of corn (2017 14.6 billion bu.) into fuel it would only replace 2.7 million barrels of gas per day of the 10 mbpd presently supplied.
Not even close, Ohio grows tons of sugar beets and they yield more than double the ethanol per acre than field corn produces. The only reason the USA focuses so much on Corn is federal subsidies organized by the Corn Growers Association lobbyists. Even sweet potatoes and white potatoes yield more ethanol per acre than maize.
If you get a good crop.
To say the 2019 sugarbeet season has been rough is putting it mildly. Knutson said, "Yes, the struggles were real and took their toll on growers. No ton came through the gate that did not have sweat and blood involved. Many went above and beyond what was expected to get the crop in." Knutson added that during this growing season "we had snow, rain, frost, flooding and a freeze; about the only thing we didn't have was locusts."
https://www.dtnpf.com/agriculture/web/a ... sugarbeets
Congratulations! That has to be one of the most blatent examples of cherry picking of all time!
Face facts, Sugar Beets along with potato, yam and cassava all of which happen to be root crops are far higher yield in terms of ethanol per acre ON AVERAGE than field corn ON AVERAGE. Picking a bad year or even a bad decade for one crop has a moderate impact on the average yield which has been growing for all regularly farmed crops for decades as agronomists and farmers have learned how to squeeze the most production possible out of a plot of land. Heck just in my lifetime (at 53) I can tell you the planting interval for seed corn in a field has dropped by about half since the 1970's because modern farmers pour on the chemical fertilizer needed to support high density planting patterns. When you combine breeding to increase cob length and therefore seeds per plant and plants per row/Acre of land the yield for field corn is somewhere between three and four times what it was in 1970. However unless we start substantially modifying the genes of maize we are up against a set of limits at this point. Failure to fertilize at the right time and protect the dense corn rows from pests with the modern pattern actually leads to reduced yields because fungus and insect damage spreads a heck of a lot easier in a dense pattern field of monocrop and without the fertilizer and petrochemicals that field suffers badly.
Less work has been done on making root crop planting of greater density because most root crops react differently to high fertilizer loads than grain crops which are all subspecies of grass. If you fertilize a root crop too much you get voids in the core of the tuber, something potato farmers learned the hard way decades ago. Consumers who get what looks like a great Baked Potato and then discover a discolored void space in the core leads to bad sales in the future. The potatoes are still perfectly healthy to eat, but they look unsightly to modern consumers who have certain expectations. However if the crop is being grown specifically as an energy crop visual appearance is totally irrelevant. This is one of the reasons sugar beets have such a high average yield, the consumer never sees the actual beets, just the refined sugar made from them. To process a sugar beet it is first washed and scoured to remove the dirt and debris stuck to the tuber, then it is sliced in wafer thin sections and sprayed with boiling water to wash out the sugar. If you are using it for an ethanol crop the boiled slices are then ground into paste, mixed with water and enzymes to break down the starches into glucose and fed to a batch of yeast to produce ethanol. That can be done with or without extracting the table sugar which just adds to the yeast feedstock if you are growing it as an energy crop or sold separately as a cash side line.
II Chronicles 7:14 if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.