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To: elmatador who wrote (439)	9/13/2005 11:06:56 AM
From: Slagle	Read Replies (1) of 219277

Elmatador Re: "200 million dormant acres to cultivate" And that is exactly what they are doing. They are just planting this cane on "new ground" and when the nitrogen is exhausted they move on and clear more forest. You cannot continue to plant sugar cane on the same land year after year without the application of large amounts of fertilizer; nitrogen, phosphate and potash. And the nitrogen fertilize requires large amounts of fossil fuel to produce, usually natural gas. Here in Florida we grow lots of sugar cane on a perfect soil, rich Everglades "black muck". But we have nearby in Miami vast amounts of nitrogen rich sewage sludge available and this is the nitrogen source for the Florida sugar cane. Sludge is not really good for the land as it is likely to contain trace amounts of heavy metals and other toxins (you can never really control what people put in a sewer, try as you might). We could burn all our cornstalks and other stalk materials for fuel, but instead we plow the stuff under as a "manure crop" to add humus and to make the soil hold water continue to produce good crops. If we just destroyed all the stalk material over time land quality would suffer. What you are describing in Brazil is just a sort of industrial scale "slash and burn" agriculture that will rapidly wreck the soil and will cause yields to drop quickly without high application rates of soil amendments. ANd the main amendment, nitrogen, requires lots of natural gas for its production. Better to just burn the natural gas directly as a fuel and not waste it on a destructive ethanol "make-work" effort. The ethanol is useful (at 5% of the gasoline) as an octane booster and pollution abater, but to think you can run the world on ethanol is just not realistic. Soybean oil is probably a better bet, much easier on the land as it can be "no-tilled" and requires no nitrogen as it is a legume. You have 12 million acres in sugar cane; we have 63 million acres in soybeans. Slagle

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