Potatoes for Ethanol

I copied this from Jerry Pornelle’s web site from his quick forum on corn and ethanol.

This is the first that I have heard of displacement hydroponics. I also find the 200 tons per acre a bit hard to swallow, however achieved.

What we need, I suppose is a completely new starch crop that can prosper in this hydroponic environment. Since tomatoes work so well, then perhaps we can do this with potatoes. The only modification would be to prevent any light getting on the roots. Potatoes are also a preferred feedstock for ethanol anyway. In fact, why the hell are we producing corn to make ethanol anyway?

Corn produces ten tons of stover to produce perhaps one ton of starch in the form of corn. The complete reverse will be true for potatoes. We must be crazy!

So a hydroponics operation producing 200 tons of potatoes per acre per year certainly competes with the current state of algae production.

It also strikes me that the bulk of the nutrients will be in the plant itself and open to recovery.
So a simple hydroponic potato protocol may be just the ticket for the mass production of ethanol. It should operate with a minimized water and nutrient loss while producing essentially pure starch on a fraction of the land demanded by any other protocol.

We may even breed a consumer version with non toxic skins as they will not have to fight the soil.

This all achievable right now and ethanol producers can start by encouraging potato crops with their local suppliers since the subsidy game is not likely to last long with all this recent heat. Even field potatoes are a better production deal than corn once you decide to buy starch. Half the acreage will produce as least as much as corn.

The only problem with potatoes is storage which is much fussier than corn.

Subject: corn, food, and ethanol

Hi, Jerry - first, thank you so much for printing the entire exchange. I think you fairly represented my views, and I greatly appreciate your doing so.

I had intended to follow your site closely this week, but my evil overlord masters - AKA customers - demanded that I actually work for a living. Hence I've put in about 50-ish hours in the last 3 days, and today I am both frazzled and out of touch. But let me touch on a comment or two regarding our discussion.

Jim comments that "food availability is decreasing because food is being diverted to fuel production". I would disagree with that assertion; in fact, food is plentiful. There have been no riots due to lack of food; the riots have been caused because the food, although plentiful, was too expensive to purchase. That is a very, very important distinction. I state again: There's lots of food on the shelves. There is no shortage of food. The problem is not the availability, but the price.

In the United States, we have lots of land that is not in production, simply because there is no demand for the food that it could grow. If ethanol production increases, I would expect that the quantity of land not currently in production would decrease; but until it hits zero, diverting food to ethanol production will have no measurable impact on food costs.

Bob Ludwick offers some figures regarding the water requirements of corn growing. Well, he's right, sort of; but you wouldn't grow corn in the desert the way its grown in Nebraska.

What you would do is grow corn using a displacement irrigation hydroponics system. The way I did this, to grow tomatoes in January in my apartment 20 years ago, was to start with a tray filled with gravel. Below that, I had another sealed container with the nutrient solution; and every hour, a timer would start a pump which would pump the nutrient solution from the lower tray up to the gravel filled tray, which contained my tomato plants. When the upper tray was flooded, the air between the gravel was forced out; and when the timer kicked off, the pump would stop and the solution drained back into the lower tray. This sucked fresh air back into the spaces between the gravel, thus providing oxygen for the plants (plant roots require oxygen, or they rot).

This proved to be an amazingly efficient way to grow tomatoes. There was virtually no water lost due to evaporation; all I needed to do was add a tiny quantity of water to the lower tray every few days. (I also added fresh nutrient solution).

In fact, most conventional irrigation - just setting up a great big lawn sprinkler, which is essentially the way commercial irrigation is achieved - results in 90% water loss due to evaporation. This is why drip irrigation systems are so dramatically effective at growing plants, yet use virtually no water. And displacement hydroponics systems are considerably more efficient than drip irrigation.

Here's a quick quote from an article on hydroponics in the desert, from a quick google search:

"Naturally, the weather is hot and dry. The average yield for vegetables in the field is about 5 tons for each acre used (85,000 acres in all). Yet in the greenhouse at Riyadh, the American company gets more than 200 tons for each acre planted! No wonder the Saudis are impressed and keep urging the Americans onto higher achievements."

You can read the article at http://www.mayhillpress.com/arabian.html . There are probably better sources of information, but I'm too crusty and burned out this morning to hunt for them.

We will need water to do a lot of things, including growing crops. And given the importance of water, we should shift over to hydroponics for all our food production. If we could save 90% of the water used for irrigation currently, it would take a lot of the load off our current water woes.

But more generally: we need to confront all our challenges with a positive, 'can do' attitude. If we stop, throw down our tools and quit every time we bump into a problem, we will die. We'll die as individuals, and we'll die as a nation.

But America is a 'can do' nation. Or at least, it used to be; just a few weeks ago I was going through some old black and white photos from my youth, and discovered pictures I'd taken of the screen of our television, as one of the Apollo moonships lifted off. With the American flag billowing gently in the foreground, in the corner of the shot - I stopped, and looked at that shot for a long time. It brought tears to my eyes.

Jerry, we were once a nation that could do anything. We've walked on the soil of another planet. We've sent probes to Mars, not once, but many times. We invented nuclear plants, and every watt of power generated from nuclear energy on planet Earth today, owes its heritage to American Ingenuity.
Surely to hell we can figure out how to grow corn.

Take care, my friend - Charlie

I did some experiments with hydroponics back in survivalist days. We used hand labor -- lift the buckets by hand to make the hydroponic fluids flow -- and got amazing crops of tomatoes, cucumbers, squash; indeed a lot of edibles from a small shed in my back yard. The structure was plastic tubes, heavy plastic covering, some netting to provide wind strength, and some nylon line to anchor the whole system. It did use electricity in that there was an exhaust fan. I wrote it up in both Survive Magazine and in A Step Farther Out, the Galaxy Column. Hydroponics farming gives a huge return on time investment, and most of the work can be done by minor children. In my case it was labor intensive, but not horridly so. The boys were able to lift the buckets twice a day (that was our schedule as I recall; I would have to find the log books from 30 years ago to be sure). But one thing is certain, we got a lot of fresh vegetables from it. Another certainty: it wasn't worth the effort to keep it up once Lucifer's Hammer hit the best seller list and we wanted the back yard for a pool.

I still have room for a hydroponics shell (a small one) and if it comes to a real crunch on food I'll look into that again. Actually the proper time to look into it is now. The equipment isn't cheap but it's likely to be really expensive if we go into depression times. A vegetable garden in your yard is already a reasonable investment. If you want a lot of yield, look into hydroponics. It worked for me anyway.

As to whether American ingenuity can use that technology to help win us energy independence, I have to say it again: cheap energy will cause a boom. The only cheap energy I know of is nuclear. Three Hundred Billion bucks in nuclear power will do wonders for the economy. We build 100 1000 MegaWatt nuclear power plants -- they will cost no more than 2 billion each and my guess is that the average cost will be closer to 1 billion each (that is the first one costs about 20 billion and the 100th costs about 800 million). The rest of the money goes to prizes and X projects to convert electricity into mobility.

Of course we won't do that. - jp

Potatoes Rising

Sometimes, you forget what you know. I thank Terry Wade for reminding me that the potato revolution is long from over. The potato single handedly freed Europe from endemic famine and fed the population expansion from the seventeenth century to the present.

That China has made such a huge investment in potato production comes as a complete surprise. That India also will is another surprise.

Yet the logic is there. A mere acre of land can easily produce over a ton of potatoes. I know this from personal experience. It takes several acres to produce the equivalent in grains. This is why famine is no longer a real threat anywhere unless it is artificially caused.

The only difficulty is that at the subsistence level it takes a little more labor than almost any other crop. For the uninitiated, besides cutting seed eyes and planting them several inches deep, one has to also hill the rows at least twice, if not three times, normally by hand with a hoe. However, an acre of such work is not onerous and it is the best payoff in the household garden with enough for a family all winter.

It also solves another issue that I was mulling over. Subsistence level biochar production with corn root earthen kilns requires a sister crop to plant every second season at the least. The Amazon Indios were able to use cassava in the rainforest. This is an unlikely option elsewhere. The fact is that the potato is suitable everywhere else that you are able to grow corn.

Thus in one season the land can produce a ton of corn and in the next season a couple tons of potatoes. If one is additionally growing legumes with the corn as in the three sisters system, then the soil is getting a nitrogen boost.

Returning to my favorite tropical soils that are today a disaster, this growing protocol has one other advantage. Freshly cleared and broken soil requires a great deal of working in order to provide a quality seedbed. The extra hilling needed for potatoes does exactly this.

I once converted a section of lawn into a planting bed by first breaking and turning the sod deeply enough to give me several inches of working soil. I then planted potatoes. By season’s end I had a fine seedbed. The potatoes were scarred from a too biologically active soil but by then I knew how to work with the resultant soil. And I had my bed. I would recommend this process to any hobby gardener who wants to restore flower beds.

I am optimistic that huge tracts of tropical soils can be brought into continuous cultivation using this virtuous corn potato protocol producing viable livelihoods for a couple of billion people at least. I would expect to feed a family of several mouths on perhaps two to three acres of tropical soils that once could only give one crop in fifteen years. Just three growing seasons per year with one crop of corn and two crops of potatoes would produce about ten tons of potatoes and likely a couple of tons of corn on two to three acres of land. I suspect that this is much more productive than a rice paddy.

As other staples soar, potatoes break new ground

TERRY WADE
Reuters

April 16, 2008 at 9:04 AM EDT

LIMA — As wheat and rice prices surge, the humble potato - long derided as a boring tuber prone to making you fat - is being rediscovered as a nutritious crop that could cheaply feed an increasingly hungry world.

Potatoes, which are native to Peru, can be grown at almost any elevation or climate: from the barren, frigid slopes of the Andes Mountains to the tropical flatlands of Asia. They require very little water, mature in as little as 50 days, and can yield between two and four times more food per hectare than wheat or rice.

"The shocks to the food supply are very real and that means we could potentially be moving into a reality where there is not enough food to feed the world," said Pamela Anderson, director of the International Potato Center in Lima , a non-profit scientific group researching the potato family to promote food security.

Like others, she says the potato is part of the solution.

The potato has potential as an antidote to hunger caused by higher food prices, a population that is growing by one billion people each decade, climbing costs for fertilizer and diesel, and more cropland being sown for biofuel production. To focus attention on this, the United Nations named 2008 the International Year of the Potato, calling the vegetable a "hidden treasure."

Governments are also turning to the tuber. Peru's leaders, frustrated by a doubling of wheat prices in the past year, have started a program encouraging bakers to use potato flour to make bread. Potato bread is being given to school children, prisoners and the military, in the hope the trend will catch on.

Supporters say it tastes just as good as wheat bread, but not enough mills are set up to make potato flour.

"We have to change people's eating habits," said Ismael Benavides, Peru's agriculture minister. "People got addicted to wheat when it was cheap."

Even though the potato emerged in Peru 8,000 years ago near Lake Titicaca, Peruvians eat fewer potatoes than people in Europe: Belarus leads the world in potato consumption, with each inhabitant of the Eastern European state devouring an average of 171 kilograms a year.

India has told food experts it wants to double potato production in the next five to 10 years. China, a huge rice consumer that historically has suffered devastating famines, has become the world's top potato grower. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the potato is expanding more than any other crop right now.

The developing world is where most new potato crops are being planted, and as consumption rises poor farmers have a chance to earn more money.

"The countries themselves are looking at the potato as a good option for both food security and also income generation," Ms. Anderson said.

The potato is already the world's third most-important food crop after wheat and rice. Corn, which is widely planted, is mainly used for animal feed.

One factor helping the potato remain affordable is the fact that unlike wheat, it is not a global commodity, so has not attracted speculative professional investment.

Each year, farmers around the globe produce about 600 million tonnes of wheat, and about 17 per cent of that flows into foreign trade.

Wheat production is almost double that of potato output. Analysts estimate less than 5 per cent of potatoes are traded internationally.

Raw potatoes are heavy and can rot in transit, so global trade in them has been slow to take off. They are also susceptible to infection with pathogens, hampering export to avoid spreading plant diseases.

But science is moving fast. Genetically modified potatoes that resist "late blight" are being developed by German chemicals group BASF. Scientists say farmers who use clean, virus-free seeds can boost yields by 30 per cent and be cleared for export.

Touting the tubers

257.25 million - World potato production in 1991 (tonnes)
320.71 million - World potato production in 2007 (tonnes)
110 - Number of calories in a medium-sized potato.
5 - Number of kilograms of potatoes needed to produce one litre of vodka.

Sources: Reuters, UN Food and Agriculture Organization

Top potato producers

In 2007, in millions of tonnes: China 72, Russian Fed. 35.7, India 26.3, Ukraine 19.1, U.S. 17.7, Germany 11.6, Poland 11.2, Belarus 8.5, Netherlands 7.2, France 6.3

Source: UN Food and Agriculture Organization