USDA, DuPont Pair up on Corn Stover Guidelines
(Associated Press/Quad Cities Times) U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack signed an agreement Friday with DuPont that will help establish guidelines for how the company will collect corn-plant residue for a new ethanol plant in central Iowa while maintaining soil quality.
DuPont is building a $200 million plant in the town of Nevada that will use 375,000 tons of corn leaves and stalks, known as stover, annually to make cellulosic ethanol. It will be the nation’s largest cellulosic plant when production _ scheduled for 2014 _ begins, making 30 million gallons of ethanol a year.
…Commercial-sized cellulosic plants are relatively new, but already about 70 projects are under construction in the United States. Two plants, including the DuPont one, are being built in the nation’s leading corn-producing state, and will use the leaves, stalks and cobs of the corn plant.
…Jeff Taylor, a fifth-generation farmer on about 1,600 acres north of Ames, said he’s worked with DuPont for more than three years studying the impact of removing stover from the field. The company takes about 40 percent and tests have shown it’s beneficial to the soil, Taylor said.
Advances in corn genetics means farmers can pack more corn plants into an acre _ from 25,000 seeds per acre a decade ago to 34,000 an acre today, Taylor said. He gets a better yield and bigger paycheck at harvest, but there’s also significantly more stover left behind.
“For producers, we started adding more tillage to control that amount of stover. As you remove 30 to 40 percent of that, it saves me a tillage pass, it saves me time as a producer,” he said.
Taylor said he’s found through soil testing that too much stover can cause certain bacteria to thrive, hinder the effectiveness of nitrogen fertilizer and suppress the emergence of new seeds in the following growing season. READ MORE
