In just about a week and a half, government officials, bioenergy experts and leaders in the private industry will gather in St. Louis, Mo., for the third in a series of conferences sponsored by the Farm Foundation addressing the issues facing rural areas as they move to a bioeconomy.
Michael Popp, professor of Agricultural Economics at the University of Arkansas, is one of the coordinators for the Transition to a Bioeconomy: Environmental and Rural Development Impacts conference, Oct. 15th-16th at the Hyatt Regency St. Louis at Union Station.
“The purpose of the conference is to provide an unbiased presentation of issues that are going to affect us in agriculture and otherwise as we transition to a bioeconomy.”
Popp defines the bioeconomy as the complex supply chain associated with providing the agricultural feedstocks, including biomass, to turn into fuel. He includes solar and wind energy in that definition as well.
Among those attending the conference will be U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Ed Schafer, who will address public policy challenges for the bioeconomy and USDA Under Secretary for Rural Development Thomas Dorr.
Popp says with the this particular conference will talk about rural development issues and the environmental factors, especially for the second-generation biofuels plants. And he says he expects
a good turnout for this more centrally-located conference.
“[Those] who should attend would be the financial community that might be asked to provide loans to these kinds of biofuels investments, rural development people – be that from municipal, state or federal governments, and finally, academia and industry to get more information on what’s truly out there and going on.”
There’s still time to sign up to attend the conference. Click here for more information, and I’ll see you in St. Louis!
To hear more of Cindy’s interview with Michael Popp, click here: [audio:http://www.zimmcomm.biz/farm-foundation/farmfoundation-popp2.mp3]
The land around Lake Okeechobee has long been one of the largest sugarcane producing regions in the nation. One company now wants to use a tract of land along the lake to produce sweet sorghum for ethanol.
Company CEO Aaron Pepper says they currently has sweet sorghum field trials underway in various types of soils in the counties surrounding Lake Okeechobee. He is shown here inspecting some of those trials. The company is negotiating with area farmers about planting sweet sorghum, which is similar to the sugarcane familiar in the area and grows up to 15 feet tall, but can yield two harvests per year and so could be planted on sugarcane acreage when it is fallow.
Ethanol plants are cool in a lot of ways. They’re producing a domestic fuel solution to our energy problems and that lessens our dependency on foreign oil for example.
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Major U.S. pipeline company 
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The world’s leading producer of camelina… a non-food oilseed… is teaming up with the University of North Dakota to produce biodiesel jet fuel from the grain.