I haven't found switchgrass easy to grow. I used the county's special prairie grass drill but it still took a couple years to come up and the patch has much other grass, weed, and small tree material that doesn't mow so nicely.
The biggest problem I see with switchgrass over corn as grain is that I believe the volume of switchgrass will be signicantly greater per gallon of ethanol production and that storage space gets outrageous. Then the switchgrass has to baled and those bales tossed about, loaded, hauled, and unloaded, with far less ease than augering and dumping grain. Ethanol plants, even corn based, tend to not store more than about a 1 week supply of grain. So we farmers have to deliver weekly on their schedule from OUR storage. When switchgrass takes several times the storage volume, storing and hauling gets to a much greater task. Switchgrass grows only in summer (a warm season grass) and yields only one cutting and you have to careful to not cut too close to the ground or you kill it.
If my switchgrass patch wasn't usually too wet for a grain crop, I'd plant it in something else. Wet is supposed to be best for switchgrass.
Then there is the LITTLE problem that the enzymes needed to convert cellulose to sugar just barely work, without the effiency needed for production ethamol plants today. There are beliefs in the industry that adequately effective enzymes will be developed "real soon now". I don't have inside information.
Right now cellulosic ethanol is just beyond a "Pie in the Sky" dream. It may never work well, but if it works it may work equally well on corn stover, hay, switchgrass, wood scraps, kudzu, and scrap paper, if the inks don't kill the enzymes.
One plant has been announced in northern Iowa and in the last couple weeks on was announced to be built in Georgia to work with wood scraps.
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Today's Featured Article - Harvestin Hay: The Early Years (Part 2) - by Pat Browning. The summer of 1950 was the start of a new era in farming for our family. I was thirteen, and Kathy (my oldest sister) was seven. At this age, I believed tractor farming was the only way, hot stuff -- and given a chance I probably would have used the tractor, Dad's first, a 1936 Model "A" John Deere, to go bring in the cows! And I think Dad was ready for some automation too. And so it was that we acquired a good, used J. I. Case, wire tie hay baler. In addition to a person to drive th
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