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Politics : Rat's Nest - Chronicles of Collapse -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (7985)	6/29/2008 10:57:50 AM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24225

Energy farm experiment in Kentucky Michael Bomford, blog, Energy Farms Network Blog about energy and agriculture, with special coverage of an energy farm experiment. Background (first post) (26 Oct 2007) My name is Michael Bomford. I work for the Community Research Service at Kentucky State University, an historically black land grant university in Frankfort, Kentucky's capitol city. My research focuses on developing sustainable organic agriculture systems suitable for adoption by small farmers. ... This summer my student, John Rodgers, conducted an energy farm experiment on organic land at the Kentucky State University Research and Demonstration farm. We grew food and energy crops on either side of a solar-heated high tunnel used for year-round vegetable production without fossil fuel heat. Our energy crops were sweet sorghum, sweet potato, corn, and Jerusalem artichoke. Each crop was grown in four plots, randomly assigned to locations throughout the energy garden. ... We're fermenting subsamples from our harvest now, to see whether carbohydrate production translates into as much ethanol as we think it will. John Rodgers will present our initial findings at the Kentucky Academy of Science meeting in early November. John's study this year is a preliminary to a four-year study, beginning next season, to examine the effect of farm scale on energy, labor, and land use efficiency of food and energy crop production. We will grow sweet sorghum, corn, sweet potato, and soybean at three different scales: 1. Biointensive - using human labor and hand tools in small beds, according to the methods of John Jeavons 2. Market garden - using no machinery larger than a walk-behind tractor in medium-sized beds 3. Small farm - using standard four-wheeled tractors for crop production at the field scale. The study will be conducted in cooperation with the Post Carbon Institute Energy Farms network. The latest report (June 25, 2008) ... We direct-seeded corn, sweet sorghum and soybeans, and transplanted sweet potato slips. Planting and management is done entirely by hand in our 'biointensive' plots. Our 'market garden' plots use no machinery larger than a walk-behind tractor. Our 'small farm' plots are primarily managed with conventional 4-wheel tractors and attachments. [VIDEO] The video shows some of our planting, transplanting, and management activities at each of the three farm scales in June. We have been able to use smaller tractors in the Small Farm plots now that the primary cultivation is complete. We are weeding these plots with a Farmall 130 tractor built in the late 1950s; all other weeding is conducted with wheel hoes, conventional hoes, or by hand-pulling. The planting and management phases, in June, required much less energy than the soil preparation phase, in May. (25 June 2008 and 26 October 2007) Photos and videos at the originals. Other postings on the subject at Michael Bomford. Recommended by contributor Jason Bradford who writes: The importance of this research in the context of peak oil is that modern agricultural methods have developed in the era of inexpensive fossil fuels with high net energy. As the net energy of fossil fuels becomes lower, agriculture will necessarily shift towards using more energy efficient methods. This research documents some of the tradeoffs between labor and non-human energy inputs, and may point towards methods that will be viable when labor becomes cheap and fossil fuels expensive. energybulletin.net