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How We Discovered that Flowers Have Sex, Leaves Eat Air, and Other Secrets of Plants
by Ruth Kassinger
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"My father burned coal to heat the greenhouses until 1967," Dean tells me. "Then oil refining became a business in the Port Huron area, and he burned 'bunker oil,' the thick oil left at the end of the refining process. By the time I got involved in the business, the infrastructure for natural gas had arrived, and I kept switching between gas and coal, going back to coal when it was cheap. Then, in 2002, all fuels skyrocketed. Our heating costs went from thirty thousand dollars an acre to one hundred thousand dollars in one season.
"The situation was dire, and I looked around for any alternative, and ended up moving into wood. There's no forest around here, but I found construction debris that otherwise would have ended up in a landfill. Every time I saw someone tearing down a building, I was there asking if I could haul away the lumber. For a while, it was fantastic: I saw my energy costs drop to twenty thousand dollars an acre. But soon everyone was going after the stuff, and builders stopped giving it away. It became a commodity. Then it got scarce, and the price went way up. Fortunately, by that time coal had become cheap again. Right now I'm burning natural gas."
About five years ago, Dean explains, his inability to get "a line of sight" on future fuel costs and his experience burning lumber inspired him to look into biomass for energy. If he could grow his own fuel, he might fix his long-term energy costs and sleep better. Maybe, with fixed energy costs, he could offer longer-term sales contracts for his tomatoes, which would attract buyers. And he figured that if a cap-and- trade system for carbon emissions ever develops, as it has for sulfur emissions, he could sell his carbon credits.
In 2006 he took a tour of European biomass farms. The English and the Germans had more varied experience with growing biomass than North Americans, who were focused on fermenting corn into ethanol to supplement gasoline. He stopped in on farmers cultivating willows and poplars, Japanese knotweed, switchgrass, and miscanthus. Knotweed turned out to be an invasive species in the United States, and therefore a nonstarter. Willows and poplars, while fast growing for trees, nonetheless take thirty years to get to harvest. In the interim, the crop could be devastated by disease, insects, or fire. Switchgrass, a perennial grass native to the North American plains, was an interesting possibility. But even more attractive was miscanthus, a perennial grass native to Asia and Africa. In Germany, researchers were having success with a hybrid called Miscanthus giganteus, a variety that grows as tall as twelve feet, and produces at least twice as much biomass per acre as switchgrass.
In Dean's eyes, the crop had additional attractions. Not only is it a perennial; it has proved to be particularly persistent. He saw experimental plots in Germany that had been growing for two decades. In Japan, where miscanthus has been cultivated for centuries as roof thatch, some stands are two hundred years old. Because giganteus is a sterile hybrid, it couldn't go to seed and escape his farm and invade his neighbors' fields. Nor would it, like kudzu, colonize by creeping: After twenty years, Danish experimental stands have expanded by only a few feet. If the crop didn't work out, it would be easy to uproot. Pests have no interest in its tough leaves, and after the first year, it grows so tall so quickly, it shades out its weedy competitors. Miscanthus can remain in the field, straw-colored and sere, until late fall or even spring, when idle harvesting and baling machines can take it down. The longer it stands in cold weather, the drier—and the better for burning—it gets. Bales of miscanthus can be left in the field for months without degrading, so there would be no storage costs.
Unlike the corn grown for ethanol in North America, miscanthus grows well on marginal land too steep, too sandy, or too low in fertility to grow row crops. In the late fall, as it stops photosynthesizing, it sends the nutrients in its stalks and leaves back underground, which means a field of miscanthus needs few or no costly fertilizers. And giganteus is unpatented and freely available. The only downside seemed to be that no one had yet figured out how to plant it efficiently, so initial planting costs would be high, but Dean figured he could overcome this. On his return from Europe, Stephen Long, professor at the University of Illinois and one of the world's leading miscanthus researchers, gave him five rhizomes to try in Ontario.
Excerpted from A Garden of Marvels by Ruth Kassinger. Copyright © 2014 by Ruth Kassinger. Excerpted by permission of William Morrow. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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