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The Rural Voice, 2006-10, Page 30crop economical on high value southern Ontario land, Nott says. There's still debate on how to harvest the crop. Switchgrass is harvested once a year, in late fall after a killing frost. There's a small window of opportunity for getting the grass dried and off the field, especially with the lake -effect fall rains inland from Lake Huron. But unlike hay, it doesn't matter if the switchgrass used for biomass gets wet. So Nott's idea is to cut the plant in late fall and let it stay in the swath all winter. In the warmth of spring, the land should dry between the windrows and he plans to move in and turn the windrows onto the dry land. Those who he has consulted think the idea might work, in fact might be beneficial to the fuel. They feel the winter of weathering might degrade some of the potentially harmful elements of the plant making it burn cleaner. Exactly how to harvest the crop is still something Nott is working out. It could be chopped in a forage harvester or baled, then chopped later into fine enough particles to be pelletized. Harvesting a forage crop is not new for Nott. Part of the farming business still intact is a large-scale hay and straw operation. He has 900 acres of hay much of which he sells in large square bales to the U.S. A 30 -foot swather-conditioner helps speed the process. Switch grass is not an easy crop to handle like corn or soybeans, he says. There needs to be a whole different way of dealing with it, including storage sheds to keep it dry until needed at the pelletizer. The sale of the cash crop equipment has freed up resources to invest in new facilities for more biomass production. He envisions building his own pelletizing plant. Currently he has the oat pellets made for him but the requirements will be much different for switchgrass. "It's going to be a struggle getting this going. Maybe I'm too old to see it through," says the 60 -year-old Nott. One thing's for sure, Nott has no plans to ask for government assistance to make the project work. "I don't want the government in my life," he says. "I don't trust government." The bitterness arises from government betrayal of grains and oilseeds farmers through risk management programs. For many years under the NISA and Market Revenue programs, cash crop farmers could work within a framework that gave some stability to their business. The CAIS program means farmers pick up nearly all the risk from low crop prices, he says. much harder to extract and less efficient to use. Alberta's tar sands, for instance, require natural gas to heat the tar enough to liquify it for refining. At the same time the rise of China and India as major economic powers will increase the demand for energy to the point that 30 to 40 years from now society may have to learn how to get along without oil, Nott feels. The problem is that so many alternative forms of energy are dependent on oil, he says. Ethanol from grain. for instance, requires a heavy investment of fugl to plant, fertilize, spray pesticides. harvest and truck the grain and then to finally turn the corn into ethanol. If ethanol could be produced from fibre, it would produce much more fuel for the investment of energy. But there will be major repercussions if the world must live without oil, he says. Our entire infra- structure has been set up for oil. If biomass becomes a heating fuel of the future, for instance, the source of the fuel must be near the customer to be economical. We can't expect western Canada to be the source of biomass for eastern Canada, he says. So in the future, he sees three alternative uses for Ontario farmland: to grow crops for biomass, crops for liquid fuels like biodiesel and ethanol or for the production of food crops. While currently there are few crops a farmer can grow that will biing a return to support the cost of growing it, if fuel crops create competition for land use then food crop prices will have to rise. Higher transportation costs will make the alternative of importing food by container ship less economically attractive as well, he says. But the way we farm would also havp to change in a petroleum -short world, Nott forecasts. "Maybe the way we used to survive in agriculture The oat pell 26 THE RURAL VOICE ets are a by-product of the oat -processing business. But government knows that everyone from livestock farmers to food processors and ethanol producers, can get inexpensive corn, wheat and soybeans that are subsidized by the American taxpayer, not the Canadian taxpayer. The U.S. government seems to realize, Nott says, that Americans are going to need the farming infrastructure in the future to produce fuel and is prepared to pay to keep farmers on the land so they will be there when the energy crunch gets worse. Look how much the U.S. has invested in development of an ethanol industry while Canada has hardly got started, he points out. Some energy observers claim that more than half of all the world's known resources of petroleum has already been used up. The petroleum that's left is more expensive to find,