Making More Biofuel Means More Land to Use

These are the two questions that are frequently asked in the production of biofuels: How much biofuel can we grow? How much land will it take?

To estimate maximum biofuels production available acreages are cited, along with crop yields and production rates, but the totals fall far short of current consumption and estimated future growth in transport fuel use.

Meanwhile the twin spectres loom of "Peak Oil" and declining oil supplies on one hand and global warming caused by fossil-fuel carbon emissions on the other.

Seeking to bridge the unbridgeable gap, there's widespread fascination with high-yielding oil crops, particularly oil-bearing algae (though nobody has actually produced any biodiesel from algae yet, apart from laboratory tests), ethanol from cellulose (also a long way from commercial production), and oil palms.

It seems obvious that the highest-yielding crops will produce the most energy from the least amount of land.

But high yield is not the only factor in farming, and it may not always be the most important factor. It can make more sense for a farmer to grow a lower-yielding crop if it has more useful by-products or requires fewer inputs or less labour or it fixes more soil nitrogen for fertiliser or it fits a crop rotation better. Or if it fits an integrated on-farm biofuels production system better. The how-much-land estimates don't seem to include such things as integrated on-farm biofuels production systems. There are quite a lot of things they don't include.

Sustainable farming

Biofuels crops have to be grown, and there's a lot of common ground between growing sustainable fuel and growing sustainable food.

Large-scale industrialised farms claim to be the most efficient. They concentrate on growing high-yielding monocrops (only one crop) by mass-production methods with a lot of inputs, and they use a lot of fossil-fuel to do it. Industrial farming is a major source of global warming carbon emissions.

A sustainable mixed farm can produce its own fuel, with much or possibly all of it coming from crop by-products and waste products without any dedicated land use, and with very low input levels.

That sheds a different light on how much land is needed to grow "enough" biofuels: less land with sustainable farming, which also has much lower fossil-fuels inputs than industrial farming. Sustainable farming is the fastest-growing agricultural sector in many countries, millions of farmers worldwide are turning to sustainable methods.

Source: http://www.journeytoforever.org