High yielding crops have negative side

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Published: December 10, 2009

VANCOUVER – Efforts to increase crop yields are causing agronomic headaches, but a seed company executive hopes to turn that around.

“We have some guys who are tilling their ground four or five times to deal with the stover,”Troy Hobbs, Monsanto’s corn biofuel strategy lead, said in an interview during the recent Canadian Renewable Fuels Summit in Vancouver.

The company has interviewed growers in high production areas who are struggling to deal with the biomass left behind after harvesting high-yielding and densely populated crops.

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The U.S. Department of Energy estimates that farmers will produce 100 million tonnes of corn stover a year by 2015, which Hobbs said may some day become a second crop for growers who can sell it as a feedstock for cellulose ethanol production and biomass power generation.

“The low hanging fruit is power generation first.”

The corn biomass could be delivered directly to a nearby power plant or pelletized and shipped around the world.

About the author

Sean Pratt

Sean Pratt

Reporter/Analyst

Sean Pratt has been working at The Western Producer since 1993 after graduating from the University of Regina’s School of Journalism. Sean also has a Bachelor of Commerce degree from the University of Saskatchewan and worked in a bank for a few years before switching careers. Sean primarily writes markets and policy stories about the grain industry and has attended more than 100 conferences over the past three decades. He has received awards from the Canadian Farm Writers Federation, North American Agricultural Journalists and the American Agricultural Editors Association.

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