Growing fuel in the dirt is very hard on the planet. Not only does it suck up a lot of land (on top of what we already need to grow food) it also covers that land with one single crop that needs all sorts of nasty things such as pesticides and fertilizers.
That would very much depend on what you are growing and what you are growing it for.
In many parts of Europe short rotation coppice is being actively researched and grown. Willow is the main crop of interest. You basically grow a field of willow and every four years cut it off about 5 cm from the surface. The willow will then re-grow and you repeat and rinse.
These crops of will require little or no additional fertiliser or pesticides and as they are only harvested every four years the energy consummation per year is low.
They also do not require very good soils in order to prosper, in fact willow does very well on wet heavy soils as it has a very high water consummation and it's roots can tolerate being fully saturated. This aspect can be a positive rather than a negative, much of the work with willow is taking place in Northern Europe where adequate soil moisture is not a problem, especially in the heavy soils which are less suitable for cereal crops.
Due to the high water usage willow can also be used as a treatment medium for organic wastes through Phytoremediation. In fact in the UK and Ireland many farmers growing willow are making most of their profit from "gate fees". This is where they charge to take in material such as sewage sludge, which is land spread on the willow.
There currently also medium scale usages of phytoremediation.
From the FAO website:
In Enköping, a town of about 20 000 inhabitants in central Sweden, a novel system has been introduced. The nitrogen-rich wastewater from dewatering of sludge, which formerly was treated in the wastewater plant, is now distributed to an adjacent 75-ha willow plantation during the growing season. This water contains approximately 800 mg of nitrogen per litre and accounts for about 25 percent of the total nitrogen treated in the wastewater treatment plant. The water is pumped into lined storage ponds during the winter and used for irrigating short-rotation willow coppice during the summer (May to September). The system was designed so that conventionally treated wastewater can be added to promote plant growth. The willows are irrigated for about 120 days annually.
The harvested willow can then be used for CHP which produces electrical energy as well as heat, or directly to produce heat (Northern Europe, lots of heat needed).
Now I know that the OP was probably refereeing to liquid transport fuels, but one barrel of oil saved is one barrel of oil saved, and if it can be done with a much reduced ecological footprint than liquid transport fuels, well so much the better.
they often leave it in gear to keep it from rolling in the lot
Evidently they don't understand the mechanics of a manual transmission either. Or, indeed, any car. That's what the handbrake is for.
It's pretty standard practice to leave a larger vehicle in first or reverse, especially for older vehicles and hilly areas.
Cars this side of the world (Europe) normally have the hand-brake on the rear axle and are driven on the front axle.
If left parked in gear this means that both axles are braked.
Also means that the vehicle won't roll if the hand-brake fails.
You make it sound like the crops used to feed livestock could be directly used to feed humans, not quite true.
Worldwide the main feed for livestock is grass or some other forage crop. Now as most children will tell you grass does not make such a good food for humans (most try at some stage and get sick).
It would not also be a simple conversion from growing grass or another forage crop to growing protein crops. Remember meat is a major source of protein. Ruminants convert relatively low quality (from a human point of view) feed to high quality animal proteins due to the four stomachs and the bacterial colonies living in the rumen.
In many areas much of the land used for livestock production could not be used productively for high protein crop production. If you have a low quality land area you lower the animal density, for protein crop production there is a min yield that is required to make the operation economically justifiable due to the inputs and mechanisation required.
This is not to say that livestock production can and does cause environmental problems due to overstocking, deforestation ect. Just that providing a similar quality protein from the same area may not be possible and that for the most part the crops grown for livestock production are in the majority not suitable for human consummation.
I was referring to feeding antibiotics in the context that the OP had refereed to it, as in added to all feed that is consumed by the animal whether required or not.
I should elaborated that antibiotics and other medicines are strictly controlled. Animal antibiotics are prescription only, as in a vet had to prescribe it (may or may not have seen the individual animal).
Full records of all medicines administrated have to he kept and as you say, for some animal medicines such as antibiotics, there is a minimum statuary withdrawal period before the animal can be slaughtered and enter the human food chain.
Not to nitpick with you too much, but a couple of points:
First not all livestock are housed all year around.
In many parts of the world livestock are only houses during the winter period of the year or during periods of low grass growth
I'm not sure about the animal health regulations in other parts of the World, but in Europe there are very strict animal heath regulations. Feeding of antibiotics is not allowed, growth hormones are not allowed. Meat and bone meal (the main 'interesting' feed material) is banned for many years now.
There is a middle ground between mass feed lot type farming systems and the organic approach.
Here in Ireland we produce about 10 times the beef that is consumed in the country. Most of this beef is produced predominantly from grass. The animals are housed only during the winter months of the year when soil conditions are unsuitable and grass growth is too low. In some other parts of the world the animals are never indoors at all.
The Irish system is fairly extensive i.e. grazing area per animal and most farms are under 100 head of stock. Not really what you'd call a factory type system.
Leftover crap?
While fermenting the straw as well as the grain of cereal crops would increase the energy production per Ha., it probally wouldn't be the best move from an environmental or crop growing point of view.
The leftover crap as you call is is biologically degraded and brought back into the soil, helping the increase the OM (organic matter) content of the soil and recycling the nutrients needed by the growing crops.
The straw and other residue material is usually chopped and spread over the ground, and this helps in moisture retention, soil erosion and increase the numbers of natural predators.
Now if you have technology to use the cellulose material from the crops, why would you grow cereal crops to produce ethanol? Many other crops such as miscanthus and hemp will produce much higher yields of usable biomass per Ha.
Miscanthus is especially suitable for this purpose, once sown it usable for up to 20 years, with annual harvesting. The harvested stems contain low levels of N, P and K which means that there is little or no transportation of essential plant nutrients off site and consequently no requirement for additional nutrients (fertiliser) after year 2-3.
At the moment in Europe there is a lot of interest in growing miscanthus for bio-energy, i.e. in wood chip, wood pellet boilers and the like.
Newgrange is a megalithic passage tomb, build in the Boyne valley of county Meath, Ireland.
Carbon 14 dating has placed the age of the site to be 3200 years old, put into perspective that is around 600 years before the pyramids and 1000 years before Stonehenge.
The passage grave is so constructed so that light reaches the inner chamber of the 1-acre mound during the winter solstice (for three days around the shortest day of the year).
Oh and the roof still doesn't leak.
If you're familiar with Irish weather, that's an achievement on its own.
Much like Stonehenge no one is sure why it was built. (apart from being a grave)
Could the designers have had similar intensions as this project has?
Over here in Europe a lot of people drive diesel cars. My current car, a TDI Golf, gets on average between 55-60 mpg (UK gallons). This with an engine with over 125,000 miles on it. Now this could be made even greener if you were to use biodiesel.
As a side note the emissions recorded for the same diesel car in the US and in Europe will be different. All diesel sold here is ultra low sulphur, which I don't think is in the US yet. This is one of the main reasons that some states don't allow diesel cars to be sold (AFAIK).
In Europe this year it looks like diesel cars will outsell petrol Even Lexus is producing a diesel IS220D over here.
Husqvarna already make mowers exactly like you describe and have done so for at lest the last 5 years.
They make two types, an auto mower which has a 4 Ah battery and goes back to a recharging base when the batter is low and a solar mower which has a solar panel on top and doesn't need a recharging base.
From the website the automower can handle a maximum area of 1500m^2 and the solar mower 1200m^2 with the solar mower working during sunlight hours and the automower working 24 hours a day.
The boundary of where each cuts is marked by an electric loop and both have sensors to find their way around objects.
Most if not all of the CO2 produced through this process will been absorbed from the atmosphere by plant life, in the case of ruminants this is usually grass and small grain crops.
For ruminants the process will be
Grass or grain feed >> ingestion and digestion by animal >> waste products excreted
Thus this is a short term recycling of CO2 rather than a net increase, as produced by fossil fuels.
E-voting in Ireland has caused much controversy in the last 6 months or so. The main objection to the system proposed for use in the European and local elections are that there is no paper trail for validation. The Irish Labour Party
Published a report at the end of 2003 about the proposed system to be used in Ireland and the flaws in that system.
All of the Irish political parties are for e-voting in principal; the main advantage from their point of view is that the long wait through numerous rounds of counts would be eliminated during the counting process. The long manual counting procedure is due the proportional representation voting system used in Ireland.
Ireland has one of the greatest wind power
potentials in the world, at the moment the largest planned offshore wind farm is being constructed on the Arklow bank off the east coast of Ireland in the Irish sea.
When completed it should provide clean energy for a large part of the south-east of Ireland
Couldn't a vineyard owner set up microclimate zones within his crops to produce a wide range of specific flavored grapes? Then it would only be a matter of picking specific flavors from the crop either for a homogenous wine made of grapes from a single zone, or a blended wine which incorporates the flavor of multiple Flavor Zones(TM). The experimentation could lead to a better wine for each vintage instead of a semi-random distribution of great vintages.
That presumes that we know how all the factors come together to produced good wine, and the micro-climate around the plant can be controlled with enough precision to produce the desired flavours.
The main advantage of this technology seems to be the possibility to produce less lower quality grapes by knowledge of the crop micro-climate, and alternating the irrigation regime accordingly. By reducing the level of low quality grapes the quality of the wine as a whole should be improved.
Particles smaller than 10 mm in diameter can be inhaled , and particals smaller than 2.5 mm in diameter can be inhaled into the lungs.
Ultra Fine Particles (UFP) are smaller than 0.1 mm in diameter and they have been linked with respiratory problems such as asthma.
The fine particals are the main problem with diesel engines.
If you think about the number of mobile phones sold, if Microsoft can get their software installed as the operating system on even of 10% of the new phones sold in the next few years these numbers could be pulled off.
This will not be a replacement of PC, these will be functional devices that do one operation and you probably won't be able to install any additional software.
For example I know of Trimble GPS systems, which uses windows CE as the operating system. There is a lot of room for embedded devices.
This system seems to work by using high resolution topographic maps of an area and overlaying high satilate images or arial photos on over topo like rendering over a wireframe model. GPS is used to determine the observers position with relation to the landscape and the images rendered from that view point.
This something like making a fly by movie of an area in a GIS, which the GRASS GIS package will allow you to do (not in real time if the resolution is any way high) with the NVIZ 3-D GRASS Interface .
The EU commission unlike its American counterparts is made up of a diverse mixture of cultures and backgrounds.
Playing to the commission and its composition authority will be orders of magnitude more difficult than doing it in the US, especially the French and Germans.
Not to say its not possible, just a lot more difficult.
Slashdot Mirror
That would very much depend on what you are growing and what you are growing it for.
In many parts of Europe short rotation coppice is being actively researched and grown. Willow is the main crop of interest. You basically grow a field of willow and every four years cut it off about 5 cm from the surface. The willow will then re-grow and you repeat and rinse.
These crops of will require little or no additional fertiliser or pesticides and as they are only harvested every four years the energy consummation per year is low.
They also do not require very good soils in order to prosper, in fact willow does very well on wet heavy soils as it has a very high water consummation and it's roots can tolerate being fully saturated. This aspect can be a positive rather than a negative, much of the work with willow is taking place in Northern Europe where adequate soil moisture is not a problem, especially in the heavy soils which are less suitable for cereal crops.
Due to the high water usage willow can also be used as a treatment medium for organic wastes through Phytoremediation. In fact in the UK and Ireland many farmers growing willow are making most of their profit from "gate fees". This is where they charge to take in material such as sewage sludge, which is land spread on the willow.
There currently also medium scale usages of phytoremediation.
In Enköping, a town of about 20 000 inhabitants in central Sweden, a novel system has been introduced. The nitrogen-rich wastewater from dewatering of sludge, which formerly was treated in the wastewater plant, is now distributed to an adjacent 75-ha willow plantation during the growing season. This water contains approximately 800 mg of nitrogen per litre and accounts for about 25 percent of the total nitrogen treated in the wastewater treatment plant. The water is pumped into lined storage ponds during the winter and used for irrigating short-rotation willow coppice during the summer (May to September). The system was designed so that conventionally treated wastewater can be added to promote plant growth. The willows are irrigated for about 120 days annually.From the FAO website:
The harvested willow can then be used for CHP which produces electrical energy as well as heat, or directly to produce heat (Northern Europe, lots of heat needed).
Now I know that the OP was probably refereeing to liquid transport fuels, but one barrel of oil saved is one barrel of oil saved, and if it can be done with a much reduced ecological footprint than liquid transport fuels, well so much the better.
Cars this side of the world (Europe) normally have the hand-brake on the rear axle and are driven on the front axle.
If left parked in gear this means that both axles are braked.
Also means that the vehicle won't roll if the hand-brake fails.
Worldwide the main feed for livestock is grass or some other forage crop. Now as most children will tell you grass does not make such a good food for humans (most try at some stage and get sick).
It would not also be a simple conversion from growing grass or another forage crop to growing protein crops. Remember meat is a major source of protein. Ruminants convert relatively low quality (from a human point of view) feed to high quality animal proteins due to the four stomachs and the bacterial colonies living in the rumen.
In many areas much of the land used for livestock production could not be used productively for high protein crop production. If you have a low quality land area you lower the animal density, for protein crop production there is a min yield that is required to make the operation economically justifiable due to the inputs and mechanisation required.
This is not to say that livestock production can and does cause environmental problems due to overstocking, deforestation ect. Just that providing a similar quality protein from the same area may not be possible and that for the most part the crops grown for livestock production are in the majority not suitable for human consummation.
I was referring to feeding antibiotics in the context that the OP had refereed to it, as in added to all feed that is consumed by the animal whether required or not.
I should elaborated that antibiotics and other medicines are strictly controlled. Animal antibiotics are prescription only, as in a vet had to prescribe it (may or may not have seen the individual animal).
Full records of all medicines administrated have to he kept and as you say, for some animal medicines such as antibiotics, there is a minimum statuary withdrawal period before the animal can be slaughtered and enter the human food chain.
Thank you for clarifying the issue.
First not all livestock are housed all year around.
In many parts of the world livestock are only houses during the winter period of the year or during periods of low grass growth
I'm not sure about the animal health regulations in other parts of the World, but in Europe there are very strict animal heath regulations. Feeding of antibiotics is not allowed, growth hormones are not allowed. Meat and bone meal (the main 'interesting' feed material) is banned for many years now.
There is a middle ground between mass feed lot type farming systems and the organic approach.
Here in Ireland we produce about 10 times the beef that is consumed in the country. Most of this beef is produced predominantly from grass. The animals are housed only during the winter months of the year when soil conditions are unsuitable and grass growth is too low. In some other parts of the world the animals are never indoors at all.
The Irish system is fairly extensive i.e. grazing area per animal and most farms are under 100 head of stock. Not really what you'd call a factory type system.
Biofuels are about converting solar energy to useful power sources so in that sense there is fast enough replenishment.
As for net energy from energy crops, LCA can be used to calculate the total energy required to produce a litre of transport fuel (petrol or diesel).
This UK study from 2003 found net energy gains from the production of biodiesel.
From that study:
Significant reduction in net CO2 emissions from biodieselWhile fermenting the straw as well as the grain of cereal crops would increase the energy production per Ha., it probally wouldn't be the best move from an environmental or crop growing point of view.
The leftover crap as you call is is biologically degraded and brought back into the soil, helping the increase the OM (organic matter) content of the soil and recycling the nutrients needed by the growing crops.
The straw and other residue material is usually chopped and spread over the ground, and this helps in moisture retention, soil erosion and increase the numbers of natural predators.
Now if you have technology to use the cellulose material from the crops, why would you grow cereal crops to produce ethanol? Many other crops such as miscanthus and hemp will produce much higher yields of usable biomass per Ha.
Miscanthus is especially suitable for this purpose, once sown it usable for up to 20 years, with annual harvesting. The harvested stems contain low levels of N, P and K which means that there is little or no transportation of essential plant nutrients off site and consequently no requirement for additional nutrients (fertiliser) after year 2-3.
At the moment in Europe there is a lot of interest in growing miscanthus for bio-energy, i.e. in wood chip, wood pellet boilers and the like.
Carbon 14 dating has placed the age of the site to be 3200 years old, put into perspective that is around 600 years before the pyramids and 1000 years before Stonehenge.
The passage grave is so constructed so that light reaches the inner chamber of the 1-acre mound during the winter solstice (for three days around the shortest day of the year).
Oh and the roof still doesn't leak.
If you're familiar with Irish weather, that's an achievement on its own.
Much like Stonehenge no one is sure why it was built. (apart from being a grave)
Could the designers have had similar intensions as this project has?
Over here in Europe a lot of people drive diesel cars. My current car, a TDI Golf, gets on average between 55-60 mpg (UK gallons). This with an engine with over 125,000 miles on it. Now this could be made even greener if you were to use biodiesel.
As a side note the emissions recorded for the same diesel car in the US and in Europe will be different. All diesel sold here is ultra low sulphur, which I don't think is in the US yet. This is one of the main reasons that some states don't allow diesel cars to be sold (AFAIK).
In Europe this year it looks like diesel cars will outsell petrol
Even Lexus is producing a diesel IS220D over here.
They make two types, an auto mower which has a 4 Ah battery and goes back to a recharging base when the batter is low and a solar mower which has a solar panel on top and doesn't need a recharging base.
From the website the automower can handle a maximum area of 1500m^2 and the solar mower 1200m^2 with the solar mower working during sunlight hours and the automower working 24 hours a day.
The boundary of where each cuts is marked by an electric loop and both have sensors to find their way around objects.
For ruminants the process will be
Grass or grain feed >> ingestion and digestion by animal >> waste products excreted
Thus this is a short term recycling of CO2 rather than a net increase, as produced by fossil fuels.
E-voting in Ireland has caused much controversy in the last 6 months or so. The main objection to the system proposed for use in the European and local elections are that there is no paper trail for validation. The Irish Labour Party Published a report at the end of 2003 about the proposed system to be used in Ireland and the flaws in that system. All of the Irish political parties are for e-voting in principal; the main advantage from their point of view is that the long wait through numerous rounds of counts would be eliminated during the counting process. The long manual counting procedure is due the proportional representation voting system used in Ireland.
Ireland has one of the greatest wind power potentials in the world,
at the moment the largest planned offshore wind farm
is being constructed on the Arklow bank off the east coast of
Ireland in the Irish sea.
When completed it should provide clean energy for a large part
of the south-east of Ireland
Couldn't a vineyard owner set up microclimate zones within his crops to produce a wide range of specific flavored grapes? Then it would only be a matter of picking specific flavors from the crop either for a homogenous wine made of grapes from a single zone, or a blended wine which incorporates the flavor of multiple Flavor Zones(TM). The experimentation could lead to a better wine for each vintage instead of a semi-random distribution of great vintages.
That presumes that we know how all the factors come together to produced good wine, and the micro-climate around the plant can be controlled with enough precision to produce the desired flavours.
The main advantage of this technology seems to be the possibility to produce less lower quality grapes by knowledge of the crop micro-climate, and alternating the irrigation regime accordingly. By reducing the level of low quality grapes the quality of the wine as a whole should be improved.
No mm, though a particle that size will not usually get down to the lungs.
Think of a bee or similar sized insect, can you say one has never got into you throat?
Though you normally either cough it up or swallow it then:)
Particles smaller than 10 mm in diameter can be inhaled , and particals smaller than 2.5 mm in diameter can be inhaled into the lungs. Ultra Fine Particles (UFP) are smaller than 0.1 mm in diameter and they have been linked with respiratory problems such as asthma.
The fine particals are the main problem with diesel engines.
If you think about the number of mobile phones sold, if Microsoft can get their software installed as the operating system on even of 10% of the new phones sold in the next few years these numbers could be pulled off.
This will not be a replacement of PC, these will be functional devices that do one operation and you probably won't be able to install any additional software.
For example I know of Trimble GPS systems, which uses windows CE as the operating system. There is a lot of room for embedded devices.
This system seems to work by using high resolution topographic maps of an area and overlaying high satilate images or arial photos on over topo like rendering over a wireframe model. GPS is used to determine the observers position with relation to the landscape and the images rendered from that view point.
This something like making a fly by movie of an area in a GIS, which the GRASS GIS package will allow you to do (not in real time if the resolution is any way high) with the NVIZ 3-D GRASS Interface .
..and you could use a big plastic bubble to set up your VPN:)
Analog all the way, eh?
The EU commission unlike its American counterparts is made up of a diverse mixture of cultures and backgrounds.
Playing to the commission and its composition authority will be orders of magnitude more difficult than doing it in the US, especially the French and Germans.
Not to say its not possible, just a lot more difficult.
This technology is being used in Europe, and if you want good information on the process you should check out AD-NETT . On a side note a fiend of mine is working on a project for a village in Freshford Co. Kilkenny, Ireland where they intend to treat the sewage of the town with a digester and use the methane in CHP (combined heat and power plant)http://www.chpa.co.uk/ to produce electricity for the national grid and use the heat for a swimming pool and