Saturday, July 22, 2023

"Continuous Living Cover" (CLC) crops and regenerative agriculture open range herder: Shrub Willow

  “continuous living cover” (CLC) crops

https://forevergreen.umn.edu/crops 

15 crops - let's see what they are!

 

After the first year in the ground, the willow is cut back to generate more sprouts, then grown for three more years before harvesting between October through April.  It sprouts again in the spring and is left to grow for three more years before again being harvested.
https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/baseload/is-shrub-willow-a-viable-biomass-feedstock-in-the-us/

Wow - I had no idea!

  some 6,000 individual plants per acre, in turn, can produce five dry tons of biomass per acre.  And unlike many agricultural crops, harvesting can be done with up to a foot of snow on the ground.

 Johnson, G., Volk, T., Hallen, K., Shi, S., Bickell, M., & Heavey, J. (2018). Shrub Willow Biomass Production Ranking Across Three Harvests in New York and Minnesota. BioEnergy Research, 11(2), 305–315. doi:10.1007/s12155-018-9897-0

Small businesses that had contracts to supply Fibrominn with wood, transportation and other services invested in trucks, industrial wood chippers and other heavy equipment, knowing that they had a guarantee of 22 years' worth of work from the plant, which burned turkey manure and wood chips to produce electricity for Xcel Energy.

But the Legislature allowed Xcel to buy its way out of the contract in 2017 after only 10 years. The city of Benson got $22 million to end the deal, and the plant was demolished and removed in 2019.

Meanwhile, the businesses that served the energy plant are facing losses that they say are in the tens of millions of dollars.

https://www.startribune.com/when-xcel-pulled-out-of-biomass-plant-small-businesses-left-in-lurch/600017857/













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