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Plowing Carbon Into the Fields
OzPeter writes "A wheat farmer in Australia has eliminated adding fertilizer to his crop by the simple process of injecting the cooled diesel exhaust of his modified tractor into the ground when the wheat is being sown. In doing so he eliminates releasing carbon into the atmosphere and at the same time saves himself up to $500,000 (AUD) that would have been required to fertilize his 3,900 hectares in the traditional way. Yet his crop yields over the last two years have been at least on par with his best yields since 2001. The technique was developed by a Canadian, Gary Lewis of Bio Agtive, and is currently in trial at 100 farms around the world."
Funny this sounded familiar, I submitted the story about the Canadian farmer three years ago. That article says it was developed by a farmer named Darrel Carlisle and is generally more informative.
Or you can read the article and see that CO2 helps anaerobic bacteria that also happen to be nitrogen fixers...guess the journalists know more than you, after all.
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
Not that blowing it into the atmosphere is much better, but doesn't diesel exhaust contain all sorts of nasty toxins?
I don't recall the exact exhaust gas composition, but in my younger days working at a research lab we participated in a series of animal studies on diesel exhaust. You could pump a lot of diesel exhaust through lab animals without any serious side effects. Some of the high dose groups had lungs that looked like they had been smoking, but none of them died from toxins in the exhaust. I don't remember there being any statistical correlation to cancers or cell differentiation, either. But that was a long time ago.
My vague memory of the conclusions were that you breath a lot of diesel exhaust without harmful side effects, although the particulates would keep your pulmonary macrophage in business.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
That so-called study is a fine example of lying with statistics - see debunking here http://www.stubbornmule.net/2009/09/baby-bounce/
Look at all these carcinogens
All in extremely low quantities and most of which are filtered out/ broken down by modern DPF and/or SCR.
Diesel is not the dirty thing of yesteryear. Reports of hazardous exhaust is greatly exaggerated and outdated. Basically the only thing that comes out of the tailpipe is CO2 and H2O.
And yes I am a diesel emissions engineer.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".