The Rural Voice, 2006-10, Page 29against high gas prices."
The idea caught on and so this
year he has signed up 32 customers
to supply with oat pellets. The pellets
produce 8,000 btu per pound, he
says.
But oat pellets were only the
trigger to fire Nott's imagination.
Samson has long been a believer
in the potential of switchgrass — a
tall perennial grass native to Ontario,
Quebec, Manitoba and Saskatchewan
— as a feedstock for creating energy
from natural products. Samson, for
instance, sees switchgrass as the
centrepiece of an ethanol -from -fibre
production system that would be
more energy-efficient than ethanol
from grain. (Ottawa company logen
is considered the world leader in
technology to create energy from
plant matter but is still seeking
funding for a full-scale plant.)
Samson found a convert in Nott
— to a point. While he's
curious about the possibilities
of ethanol from fibre, Nott's main
interest is in using the crop for
biomass: creating pellets from a plant
which can reach up to six or seven
feet tall (some varieities reach 10 feet
in a good growing season). That's a
lot of pellets per acre.
Last spring he planted 326 acres
to the grass. It takes three years to
fully establish the crop. Right now
the fields look more like weeds than
switchgrass, he says. A lot of the
seeds don't even germinate until the
second year. Experts assure him that
next year it will look like
switchgrass, he says with a touch of
hopefullness in his voice.
He's been getting advice from
agronomist Pat Lynch in growing the
crop. They're exploring starting the
crop by underseeding it into oats for
the first year.
Switchgrass's reward will come
once the crop is established. Experts
say that one seeding can last up to 20
years before it has to be replanted.
That means, Nott says, that there's
not nearly as much energy input into
planting crops, fertilizing etc, that
goes into growing corn for ethanol
production.
The key to the possibility of
switchgrass as a future energy crop
for Ontario farmers will be in
producing large enough yields,
inexpensively enough to make the
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OCTOBER 2006 25