Sustainable Row-crop Agriculture

Sustainable Row-crop Agriculture

An example of my solution is to put biomass harvesting units all along appropriate stretches of the Mississippi River and all its tributaries to gain the biodiesel and the pressed cakes after the oils are extracted, which, if my math is correct is enough annually to supply the fertilization needs of Big Agriculture for corn & soy bean rotations, totally eliminating the need for ammonia, a fossil-fuel dependent method to get the yields they need to pay the huge bill for using it.

The cakes are a true soil enhancement, beyond soil amendments which only last 1-2 seasons, an enhancement enriches the soil with organics to add to its structure, its ability to hold moisture and provide habitat for soil inhabitants, from fungi to worms, part of organic farming.

So, this plan produces gigatons of pressed cakes free for the taking & processing, not to mention billions of gallons of biodiesel and other useful oils and nobody is eating it as a food, so, all that excess nutrition goes shooting out into the Gulf of Mexico and all that fresh-water plankton dies to produce the seasonal "Dead Zone".

Now, with a domestic supply of farm fuel and fertilizer that's free until our cities & towns stop polluting groundwater and run-off, then we'll have to come up with something else like wastewater effluent ... probably enough of that to do something, Phoenix, AZ, has 10-million gallons a day of it, that's 83-million pounds of nutrients the biomass has to eat before tomorrow, converts to over 2-gallons of biodiesel per person per day from this source and the water is almost pure at the end so treated and recycled.

Hope that does the job of creating an economy due to profit from biodiesel from ignored sources and recycling fresh water on a municipal scale, saving billions a year nationally this all emits 40% of the harmful emissions versus gas-ethanol extract it to burn it up, it’s a real cut of emissions, soot is a problem biodiesel refiners have already begun to reduce, emitting about 30% less soot over fossil diesel at this time.

These two strategies can supply all volume needs with biodiesel for transportation and agriculture, and enhance the soils on a long-term basis versus today’s costly methods, providing an economy and scale that provides more food per watt used, the ultimate measure of efficiency as we leave the Industrial Age for the Thermally Aware Age, where all energy transformations are conserved instead of all the heat wasted we see today.

With the cost of corn tied to biomass production instead of the price of ammonia, we’ll have more food for less. The parasitic and captive-market system currently in vogue seems to be losing its favor lately, hoping that’s a trend, I remain without funding for these ideas, with public utility PhD’s ready to work on the problems of pathogens & poisons, nice project.