by Chelsea Harvey (The Washington Post)  … In a paper published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers found that land use changes associated with planting crops and grazing livestock have caused a …

by Ann Bailey (Ethanol Producer Magazine)  Farmers continuously implement new environmentally friendly techniques to raise their crops.  —  Corn farmers—and with them, the ethanol industry—are growing more sustainable.
Farmers in corn states are embracing a variety …

(Phys.Org)  … Taking up this double-edged sword is Cynthia Bartel, a doctoral candidate at Iowa State University. She’s finding a way to lessen the harm and increase the benefits of removing maize stover.
“While water and wind …

Significant scientific uncertainty exists about crop residue removal and potential effects on soil carbon.
Advanced biofuels and bioproducts are being made from crop residues in the US and elsewhere; however, the market value and sustainability of …

by Ron Alverson (Ethanol Producer Magazine/American Coalition for Ethanol)  Life-cycle modeling for ethanol needs to be updated to reflect big improvements in corn’s GHG emissions profile  —  … Fuels that help automakers achieve efficiency standards are going …

by Sam Harrington (Yale Climate Connections)  Until about 10 years ago, spring wheat was a favorite crop for farmers in North Dakota.
Erickson: “Beginning in 2007, when the government heavily incentivized corn production for ethanol use, corn …

by Helena Tavares Kennedy  (Biofuels Digest)  … While there were big questions, there were big answers, beginning with a panel on The Sustainable Agriculture Imperative. John Pieper from Dupont Industrial Biosciences shared their latest work with …

by Julie Chao  (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)  Two projects will provide a window to the underground, yielding information on roots and soil  —  As advanced as agriculture has become, there remains a pressing need for …

by Steffen Mueller (University of Illinois at Chicago Energy Resources Center)  … The authors essentially challenge the accuracy of traditional life cycle analysis with their new model.
…
The authors argue that “for a biofuel to provide a net …

by Gollany HT, Titus BD, Scott DA, Asbjornsen H, Resh SC, Chimner RA, Kaczmarek DJ, Leite LF, Ferreira AC, Rod KA, Hilbert J, Galdos MV, Cisz ME (Biogeochemical Research)   Rapid expansion in biomass production for …

(Environmental and Energy Study Institute)  On April 12, the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E) announced a new funding opportunity aimed at increasing the carbon storage potential of U.S. agricultural soils.  Land-use, …

by Lizzy Schultz (AgWired)  Twenty-five more farms have joined in on the groundbreaking research effort from Soil Health Partnership (SHP) that could change the way farmers take care of their land.
SHP works to test and …

by Cindy Zimmerman (AgWired)  At the first Soil Health Summit last year, I talked with Purdue University agricultural economist Dr. Wally Tyner about the need to quantify the economic benefits for farmers of using cover …

by Louisa Burwood-Taylor (AgFunderNews)  … “Ecological farming is ‘AgTech’ but of a different kind. It is a return to the original definition of ‘technology’, which comes from two Greek words: technis, which means art, skill, craft or the …

by Mark E. Griffin (Wisconsin Energy Institute/University of Wisconsin)  A six-year Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC) study on the viability of different bioenergy feedstocks recently demonstrated that perennial cropping systems such as switchgrass, giant …

by Laurencas Raslavicius (ResearchGate) This review paper sets the stage for a look at the Lithuanian (hereinafter LT) transport sector and its transition towards sustainable mobility through the use of biofuels and implementation of the necessary …

(Bioenegy Insight)  The Aberystwyth University in Wales, UK and the supply chain specialist Terravesta are running new trials to examine how the energy crop miscanthus survives in water-logged land and its effect on the soil …

(Michigan State University)  Michigan State University has earned a $5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to better understand how biofuel crops acquire nitrogen, insights that could help maximize yields while minimizing fertilizer …

(US Department of Agriculture/Ohio State University)  The long term goal of this project is to commercialize an integrated anaerobic digestion system (iADs) that promises cost competitive bioenergy and biofuels production from lignocellulosic biomass. The specific …

(SCOPE) Bioenergy & Sustainability is a collective effort with contributions from 137 researchers of 82 institutions in 24 countries.  The volume is the outcome of an assessment that included a meeting held at UNESCO, Paris, …

(Iowa State University/Ethanol Producer Magazine)  Farmers who are considering selling corn residue from their fields to produce cellulosic ethanol first should weigh a range of site-specific factors to their operations, according to new research from …

(Farm Futures)  Models predict that miscanthus will have higher fuel yield and profit when compared to corn stover and switchgrass
A recent study simulated a side-by-side comparison of the yields and costs of producing ethanol using …

by Isabel Lane (Biofuels Digest)  In Belgium, the European Bioeconomy Alliance (EBA) has called for bioeconomy development to be set as a priority in the European Commission’s new €315 billion investment plan as well as …

by Natalie van Hoose (Purdue University)   … Growers can manage the potential risks linked to extreme rain events and soil degradation by using adaptive strategies such as planting cover crops, using no-till techniques, increasing the …

by  Susanne Retka Schill  (Ethanol Producer Magazine)  The estimation of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions due to land use change (LUC) for corn ethanol has been ratcheted down by Argonne National Laboratory. The recently published manual …

(25 x ’25)  Making sure the federal accounting system for biogenic carbon emissions—ensuring that it is an accurate system, and taking into scientific account the unique features of biomass in the carbon cycle is front …

by Olatomiwa Bifarin* (Advanced Biofuel USA) On Tuesday, July 15 2014, Biofuels Digest hosted a webinar discussing creating sustainable supply chains for cellulosic biofuels – a germane issue that will ultimately determine the commercial viability …

by Lindsey Alexander  (Purdue University)  Farmers using cover crops as a soil conservation method can remove much more corn stover per acre for biofuels or other uses and at the same time potentially increase their …

(US Department of Agriculture)  The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) today released a report that,for the first time, provides uniform scientific methods for quantifying the changes in greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) and carbon storage from various …

by Noah Fierer, Joshua Ladau, Jose C. Clemente, Jonathan W. Leff, Sarah M. Owens, Katherine S. Pollard, Rob Knight, Jack A. Gilbert, Rebecca L. McCulley (Science Magazine)  Tallgrass prairie is extinct across much of its …

by Mary C. Scholes, Robert J. Scholes (Science Magazine)    In the past, great civilizations have fallen because they failed to prevent the degradation of the soils on which they were founded (1). The modern world could suffer …

by Noel P. Gurwick, Lisa A. Moore, Charlene Kelly, Patricia Elias (PLOSone)   Claims about the environmental benefits of charring biomass and applying the resulting “biochar” to soil are impressive. If true, they could influence land management worldwide. Alleged benefits …

(EurActiv.com)  Biofuels made from food crops indirectly generate net emissions of greenhouse gases in the future, confirm the preliminary results of two studies on the history of the change in land use.
If the peer does …