Yesterday I went to Open Grounds Farm. This farm is about 240 km east of Durham and has some Canola fields we are experimenting on.
Canola is a relatively new thing in North Carolina and I was expecting the farm to be a small "hippy" place - who else would be really interested in alternative fuels and new crops.
Nothing could be further from the truth. This was my first encounter with real industrial agriculture. They grow mainly corn and soya beans. Open Grounds comes in at an impressive 36 000 acres! It is the light coloured bit in the picture below. I put it next to Perth for a size comparison. They have an office bu idling, a full time chef, and their grain silos are as big as most CBH's I've been to! The whole farm is completely flat and drawn up into a 1 mile by mile grid, as you can see from the picture at the bottom.
Crazy!
6 comments:
They need to do something in a big way. World oil consump. is 76 million barrels A DAY of which USA consumes 20 million a day and produces 8 million (EU is 15 million used and 3 million produced)Australia is a mere puddle at 800,000 a day used and 540,000 produced. Thats about .07 barrels they use per person per day in USA (Canada is much the same) 0.04 in Aus and 0.03 in EU.
Its going to need a lot of canola to meet that - how much oil does 36000 acres produce Nic?
Cheers Rod
Well..., I am not sure what average yields for Canola are here, hence the reason we are doing the experiment. I think are they are at least 1 T/acre though. The grain is about 40% oil so we could produce roughly 14 million liters or about 88 thousand barrels of bio diesel a year. So, you’d need about 80 thousand farms of the same size as Open Grounds to produce the US oil demand, and that does not count the oil needed to grow the Canola. Some quick back-of-the-envelop calculations show this bigger than the entire land area of the US.
The moral of the story is – we need crops that have higher yields per hectare, like Switchgrass that produces perhaps 10 T/acre annually, and the US needs to use less fuel.
So with global warming enabling most of Siberia to become farming land and tropicalising most of Aus (so Aus could grow stuff in most of its vacant land), Russia and Aus are the next oil capitals of the world...!!!??
Do forget northern Canada and the land under the greenland ice sheet.
Right better start buying land in N Canada and the Great Sandy desert - only problem is time frame can we hurry this process up somehow - better vote labour next time they are keen on coal fired power stations
Maybe we could liposuction all that fat off the obese people of the world and use that - it is a survival mechanisim afterall (hey thats approx 10 Trillion Joules of energy for USA alone!! cooking with gas/fat)
Cheers
Rod
Cutting consumption eh? That's a tough one to put to the economists of the world. Our world relies on convincing people they want crap they don't need, and that they buy it with money they haven't got.
But alas. Just call me a greeny commie pinko apologist for the terrorists and be done with.
...hehehe
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