College Station, Texas
May 3, 2007
The U.S. has entered the "era of
the bio-economy," said U.S. Department of Agriculture
Undersecretary Gale Buchanan.
"This could have the most important impact on agriculture in 150
years. To fully meet the nation's needs for sustainable
resources, we've got to look at all types of feedstock," said
Buchanan, who recently visited the
Texas A&M University System campus at College Station on May
1.
Buchanan, along with Texas Commissioner of Agriculture Todd
Staples, agribusiness leaders and media representatives, were at
the campus to tour the Texas A&M Agriculture effort in biofuel
research. The Texas A&M biofuel research effort goes beyond corn
for ethanol, a multi-disciplinary effort that includes crops
bred specifically for high-tonnage biomass for biofuel and
generating electricity, engineering research into processing the
biomass, and cropping systems that would allow farmers to not
just grow the crops, but grow them profitably, said Dr. Juerg
Blumenthal, a Texas A&M Agriculture agronomist.
The problem with some biofuel crops is that they may have been
well thought out at the engineering/refining level but not at
the farming level, said Blumenthal, one of the many featured
speakers on the tour. The Texas A&M program is avoiding this
problem by incorporating cropping system trials at the field
level as dedicated biofuel systems are developed.
"It just makes common sense, that if you are talking about a
dedicated energy crop, you have to develop a crop production
method that farmers can make money with. If they can't make
money with it, they're not going to grow it." said Blumenthal,
who has a joint appointment with the Texas Agricultural
Experiment Station and Texas Cooperative Extension.
"The strength of the effort is to bring everything to the table,
from crop development to engineering, from crop systems to
genetics," Blumenthal said. "My responsibility is to develop
recommendations how to grow these crops profitably."
One of the stars of the event was not a dignitary or a
scientist, but a sorghum cultivar that has been bred to produce
large amounts of biomass that can be converted into biofuel.
Though a lot of attention has been paid to using corn grain as a
biofuel source - converting starch to ethanol - as the primary
biofuel method, it may not the answer for Texas, said Dr. Bill
McCutchen, deputy associate director of the Texas Agricultural
Experiment Station. Moreover, there are better alternatives for
the Lone Star State.
As an example of such alternatives are sorghum cultivars that
have been bred to produce either a high tonnage of biomass or
high sugar content, McCutchen said.
One sorghum, developed by Dr. Bill Rooney, Experiment Station
plant breeder, can produce from 15 to 20 dry tons of biomass per
acre, McCutchen said.
Other crops for biofuel have been considered, some of which are
exotic while others abandoned decades past because they weren't
profitable for growers. But some scientists are not considering
the logistics of harvesting and transporting many of these
proposed biofuel crops, McCutchen said.
McCutchen and others talked about by-passing current ethanol
production methods, which relies on a fermentation process
similar to what is used to produce consumable alcohol from the
sugars in grains such as corn. Instead, they spoke of going
directly from cellulose, the main constituent of leaves and
stalks, to ethanol and other biofuels.
These methods have the promise of converting all of the plant
material - not just the grain - into biofuels or directly into
electricity. Because very little plant material is wasted, these
technologies should also be more environmentally viable,
McCutchen said.
Rooney emphasized that the sorghum lines he developed are part
of a conventional breeding program and are not genetically
engineered. In a conventional breeding program, parent plants
are selected for specific traits, then cross-pollinated with
other varieties to strengthen those desired traits. The process
is repeated over several growing seasons until the plant with
the desired traits breeds true.
Agronomists have essentially used the same breeding techniques
for centuries, and all modern cultivars, from improved landscape
plants to row crops, have been developed this way, Rooney said.
The process is painstaking, and the development of a new variety
takes from eight to ten years or longer. Much of that time is
spent just identifying which parent plants carry the gene that
is responsible for the desired trait.
Plant geneticists at the Norman E. Borlaug Center for Southern
Crop Improvement have mapped the chromosomes of Rooney's
sorghums. Using these genetic maps, Rooney and other plant
breeders hope to bypass many of the field trials to identify
parent plants with the desired traits. With this technique, they
expect they can cut the time it takes to further develop
high-tonnage sorghum by more than half, Rooney said.
As a result, he hopes to be able to have a drought-tolerant
sorghum that's ready for farmers in a few years rather than a
decade, he said.
Rooney emphasized that this process is not what's commonly
called "genetic engineering." No genes from other species were
be inserted into the genomic structure of the sorghums.
Before his appointment as USDA undersecretary, Buchanan spent
more than two decades as research agronomist.
"I am impressed with what I saw today," he said. "The challenge
is to identify feedstock and convert it into some form that we
can take," he said. "It's hard to stuff feedstocks into a gas
tank. As a former scientist, it's not enough to (put together) a
good piece of research and publish a paper. That's just the
beginning."
Buchanan noted in an after-tour luncheon speech, that Title 7 of
the new federal farm bill is expected to include up to $50
million in funding as part of a bioenergy/bioproducts
initiative, with research and development conducted among select
land-grant and other universities, Buchanan said.
It is "imperative" the U.S. find ways to make fuel from
feedstocks, including waste products, such as wood chips,
Buchanan said.
Staples, who also spoke at the luncheon, was also impressed with
the scope and vision of the Texas A&M effort.
"I'm excited about what I've seen (today)," Staples said. "We
(Texas) can really capitalize and take advantage of this. For
decades we have used what's underground, and now it's a reality
to use what's above the ground."
More information on the Experiment Station's biofuel initiative
can be found at
http://agresearch.tamu.edu/BioenergyInitiatives.htm |
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