Posted on 12/07/2006 6:41:52 AM PST by Red Badger
Washington, D.C., November 27, 2006 – Having successfully turned pieces of giant soybean stalks into charcoal briquettes, Agricultural Research Service (ARS) chemical engineer Justin Barone now believes they would make good fiberboard and other wood-substitute products as well. ARS geneticist Thomas E. Devine took the plants to Barone after noticing they had a rare ability to stand up straight all season, despite their unusual height of up to 7 feet. Soybean plants often lodge—fall down—as they grow taller.
Barone is with the ARS Environmental Management and Byproduct Utilization Laboratory, and Devine is with the ARS Sustainable Agricultural Systems Laboratory, both in Beltsville, Maryland.
Devine suspected one reason the experimental line of soybeans stood so straight all season was because the cellulose fibers in their sapling-like stalks were unusually strong.
Barone's heat-measurement test supports this: A piece of the stalk takes as long to heat up as a sturdy 2x4 pine board.
Barone hopes to design a test that plant breeders can use to determine the strength or weakness of a plant's cellulose. Plants could be specially bred with strong cellulose, for use in briquettes and wood substitutes, or with weak cellulose better suited for cellulosic ethanol production.
Finding new microbial enzymes to break down tough cellulose is a major obstacle to producing cellulosic ethanol from plants such as soybeans or corn. Giving breeders a test for weak cellulose would allow them to select plants with cellulose that could be easily converted to ethanol by existing enzymes.
Devine and agronomist James McMurtrey (recently retired from ARS) found evidence for this two years ago, in a study showing that naturally occurring soil microbes degraded some soybean stalks more rapidly than others.
Soybeans have an advantage over corn and other crops because they don't need commercial nitrogen fertilizer. This helps ensure that producing ethanol or other products from soybeans uses less energy.
SOURCE; ARS, the USDA’s chief scientific research agency. www.ars.usda.gov/is/pr
I'm not a big proponent of ethanol, but the agruments about lack of production is a weak one.
Production will rise to met demand, new strains is one of the ways.
Vi-agraculture?........
Not houses... Trabants!
Now, if they could just breed a soybean that was unattractive to field mice.............the soybean field across from me is being harvested right now, even my 9 outside cats are giong to be unable to keep up with the infestation we will get. Time for more mousetraps.....SIGH
Collect them all and make mouse-diesel.............
A car that can be used as fuel.........
I'm hoping they become cat-diesel........maybe I can get away without buying cat food the rest of the week :)
Plant breeders are going to have to figure out how to increase soybean yields before soy can become revelent. Yield increases have lagged for the past 20 years, compared to the signifigant increases in corn yields.
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