Flooding In Southeast Kentucky has many residents without homes or worse, the death toll seems to be 15+ at this time, and is one of the worst flood disasters in decades. This is the time for those in surrounding areas and abroad to roll up their sleeves and pitch in to help their unfortunate neighbors. Businesses. churches, charities, and individuals can donate time and goods to help in this time of need.
Even if you’re unable to donate time you always can donate to an organization that will help the victims of the recent floods. I found this organization called Americares via FEMA, seems that they are legit and will funnel funds to help people out in disasters in the USA. link: Provide Medicine & Hope to People in Crisis (americares.org) Give it a click and help out your neighbors if you are able to.
For those who need shelter during this time, Listed below are some shelters that are in place.
Three Kentucky state parks—Jenny Wiley, Buckhorn Lane, and Pine Mountain—are open as shelters for people displaced by the severe flooding.
Breathitt County shelters: Breathitt County Courthouse Floyd County shelters: Floyd Co Community Center Hazard shelters: First Presbyterian Church, East Perry Elementary, West Perry Elementary, Gospel Light Baptist Church, Second Creek Church of God, Buckhorn Lake State Resort Lodge Pike County shelters: Thacker Memorial Funeral Home, Shelby Valley High School.
My Prayers and thoughts go out to all of those affected by the flooding and may God bless us all.
Agriculture is a leading cause of climate change, but it is also undeniably affected by it. Farming must therefore change in order to keep up with global demands, while reducing its environmental impact. Without these necessary changes, it’s estimated that by 2030, the impacts of climate change will be even worse, causing yields to decline so much that we will cancel out any progress we have made towards eliminating global hunger.
Some of those worst affected by climate change are small farmers (those working on land under two hectares). There are around 475m small farms around the world, cultivating around 12% of the world’s farmed land. Small farmers in the tropics and poorer agricultural communities will be particularly severely affected by climate change.
However, many of these small farmers are increasingly using innovative ways of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and adapting to climate change. They are the true pioneers of climate-smart agriculture, using practices that maintain productivity while decreasing emissions. They are also producing a range of other benefits such as poverty alleviation, better nutrition and biodiversity conservation.
Sustainable but healthy yields
In the 20th century, farmers boosted yields by intensifying production: using more water, land, energy, synthetic pesticides and fertilisers. This model tended to assume that you couldn’t have high yields as well as environmental protection. Now, we understand that this is a false choice, and that sustainable intensification – producing healthy yields and higher incomes while building ecosystems on and around the farm – is possible. And it looks like small farmers are leading the way in implementing such sustainable intensification around the world.
There are three steps towards sustainable intensification. These are increased efficiency (doing more with less), substitution (replacing ineffective or harmful products) and redesign (changing the whole farm to be more sustainable). These steps are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
For example, rice plants are typically planted close together in flooded nurseries. But they can also be grown in nutrient-rich nurseries that aren’t flooded – something that saves around 40% of the water used compared to conventional production methods. However, the system is about more than simple resource efficiency – it actually involves a fundamental redesign of the whole system of rice production.
Rice farmer in Punjab, India. Neil Palmer (CIAT)/Flickr, CC BY-SA
Substitution involves replacing less efficient or harmful inputs such as synthetic pesticides, which can be harmful for wildlife, with better alternatives. You can also replace old crop varieties with new ones that can withstand sudden changes, or which need less water – important for climate resilience. New varieties may also be able to help reduce agricultural emissions. For example, plants with greater root mass could help sequester an estimated 50 to 100 tonnes of carbon per hectare.
Radical approaches
Radical redesign of farms involves techniques such as conservation agriculture – practices that minimise the disruption of the soil’s structure and biodiversity. Integrated pest management, which involves strategies to deal with pests without posing risks to the environment, and agroforestry, using trees in agriculture, are also good examples. A recent assessment estimated that around 163m farms worldwide (29% of the global total) practice some form of redesign.
The evidence shows that these methods are already helping small farmers achieve healthy yields while delivering a range of other benefits, including carbon sequestration, using less energy and synthetic inputs and climate resilience.
One example is the “push-pull integrated pest management”. Push-pull is a method of pest control that was developed in East Africa to help farmers deal with stemborers and striga weeds, which attack crops such as maize. Instead of relying exclusively on synthetic pesticides, farmers grow pest-repelling plants such as desmodium (which push the pests away) in among the main crop. They also plant borders around their fields of other crops such as such as Napier grass, which attracts pests (pull).
This keeps pests away from the main cereal crops, reducing losses. In recent years, push-pull systems have been adapted to include plants such as Brachiaria, which can tolerate hotter and drier climates. Such systems are used across 69,000 small farms across Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Ethiopia.
Other methods of redesign are also being practised at scale by small farmers in other places. In India, 140,000 farmers in Andhra Pradesh and an estimated 100,000 in Karnataka practice “zero budget natural farming”. This is an initiative which promotes the natural growth of crops without adding any synthetic fertilisers and pesticides. In Africa, small farmers in Burkina Faso and Niger have taken up agroforestry and soil and water conservation, and transformed the landscape of around 500,000 hectares of degraded land.
The redesign of agriculture offers the best chances for achieving lower carbon, climate-proof agriculture in the 21st century. But, it requires new partnerships between farmers, development agencies, governments and researchers. Farming is knowledge intensive, and will be increasingly so in a changing world. Sustainable intensification initiatives that have spread to scale have all involved new initiatives to support collaboration and learning. Farmer field schools, training programmes for local farmers, are key to this. So are plant breeding programmes in which participating farmers get opportunities to make decisions at different stages during the process.
Ultimately, climate proofing is best achieved by improving the sustainability of existing systems. Small farmers already know what works. The challenge remains to help them spearhead the global spread of redesigned agriculture.
Around 20% of the UK’s farms account for 80% of the country’s total food production, and they do this on about half of all the farmed land there is. At least 80% of farms in the UK don’t produce very much at all.
In England, just 7% of farms produce over half of the country’s agricultural output – on 30% of its farmland. A little under half (42%) of England’s farms produce a meagre 2% of the total agricultural output, working just 8% of the country’s total land.
In an average year, mixed farming, livestock grazing and cereal farms make a financial loss on what they produce, and much of the income on these farms comes from government subsidy. In all these cases, this subsidy forms the majority of income. Livestock farming is the least profitable sector of all while some of the most profitable sectors like horticulture – producing everything from vegetables to soft fruit and tomatoes – receive very little subsidy.
Some farmers argue that they are the custodians of the land and the wildlife that live on it, but much of the evidence suggests that this role is neglected in the UK. Much farmed soil has been drained of its natural nutrients and now relies on artificial inputs like fertiliser. Rather than offering a haven for struggling bird species, it seems little progress has been made in halting declines in wildlife abundance on farmland.
A grey partridge – this species lives on farmland but has declined by more than 80% in the UK since 1970. Marek Szczepanek/Wikipedia, CC BY-SA
The EU’s Common Agricultural Policy protected the right of people to farm unproductive land for the sake of countryside prosperity. But farming contributes only about 4% to the rural economy of England. Overall, UK agricultural production has stagnated in absolute terms since the late 1980s. This has meant unprofitable and environmentally damaging agriculture is maintained through subsidy. It’s time that a new policy shifted the balance.
Rewild, restore and reopen
Agriculture in the UK uses a vast amount of resources – energy, pesticides, water and mineral fertilisers – compared to the amount of goods it produces. For the productivity of agriculture to match other developed sectors of the economy like construction, agriculture would need to produce five to ten times more from the land it consumes.
Much of this inefficiency is caused by the energy used to produce fertilisers and livestock production. Only about 10-20% of vegetable matter fed to livestock is converted into meat for people to eat. Animals are often fed plant-based food produced on land which could also produce human food. Around 75% of the calories fed to livestock in the UK comes from these sources. As much as ten plant-based meals could be produced for the same material cost as it takes to produce one meat-based meal.
So what’s the alternative? If the UK wants to play its part in feeding the world, keeping people healthy and conserving the environment, there is a very simple way forward. Converting the 50% of land that’s mainly used for agriculture – but which only produces 20% of the UK’s total agricultural output – to other functions, including recreation, storing carbon and enhancing biodiversity.
This could be possible over ten years. It would give enough time for people involved in farming relatively unproductive land to adapt. Some of these people will still be paid from public funds but they could be tasked with rewilding their land to forest or other habitats that can lock away CO₂ and expand wildlife habitat. Some will also be rewarded for opening their land for public access. This will be especially important for land near urban areas as access to nature has serious benefits for human health.
Spending just two hours a week in nature has been shown to benefit a person’s health and mental wellbeing. Lukasz Szmigiel/Unsplash, CC BY-SA
Growing food in different ways could also make farming more efficient and it would be needed to make up for the small shortfall in production. Vertical farming, hydroponics and aeroponics are all techniques where food is grown according to the principles of manufacturing. This means it’s produced close to where it’s consumed, no pesticides are needed and all nutrients are closely controlled, reducing pollution.
Mobilising British agriculture to help the UK reach net zero emissions would be an incredibly valuable use of the UK’s landscape. But the main challenge to this is convincing the people who currently farm the relatively unproductive land that they need to be a part of this vision. The National Farmers Union – who represent many of these particular farmers – have done much to try and sustain the status quo, especially for livestock agriculture. Overcoming this social inertia will be hard work, but vital.
Intensive agriculture may be nourishing most of the Earth’s inhabitants, but it’s doing the opposite to earth itself. Its dependence on singular crops, heavy ploughing machinery, fossil-fuel based fertilisers and pesticides is degrading our soilswildlife and nutrient cycles, and contributing a quarter of the planet’s unwanted extra heat.
But we’re not powerless to change the future of food. Nature and technological innovation are tackling these problems head on – and if the solutions they’re offering are incorporated on a large scale and used together, a new agricultural revolution could be on its way. Here are three of the most exciting developments that can help farms not just feed the planet, but heal it too.
Crops, trees and livestock in harmony
Several UN reports have highlighted agroecology – farming that mimics the interactions and cycles of plants, animals and nutrients in the natural world – as a path to sustainable food.
The approach uses a wide variety of practices. For example, instead of artificial fertilisers, it improves soil quality by planting nutrient-fixing “cover crops” in between harvest crops, rotating crops across fields each season and composting organic waste. It supports wildlife, stores carbon, and conserves water through the planting of trees and wildflower banks.
Grassland captures carbon dioxide. Animals eat the grass, and then return that carbon to the soil as excrement. The nutrients in the excrement and the continuous grazing of grass both help new grass roots to grow, increasing the capacity of the land to capture carbon.
Keep too many grazing animals in one place for too long and they eat too much grass and produce too much excrement for the soil to take on, meaning carbon is lost to the atmosphere. But if small numbers are constantly rotated into different fields, the soil can store enough extra carbon to counterbalance the extra methane emitted by livestock’s digestive rumblings.
While this doesn’t make them a carbon sink, livestock bring other benefits to the land. They keep soil naturally fertilised, and can also improve biodiversity by eating more aggressive plants, allowing others to grow. And if local breeds are adopted, they generally don’t require expensive feed and veterinary care, as they’re adapted to local conditions.
Pesticides no more
Pests, diseases and weeds cause almost 40% of crop losses globally – and without care, the figure could rise dramatically. Climate change is shifting where pests and diseases thrive, making it harder for farmers to stay resilient.
Many commonly used herbicides, pesticides and fungicides are now also under pressure to be banned because of their negative effects on the health of humans and wildlife. Even if they’re not, growing resistance to their action is making controlling weeds, pests and diseases increasingly challenging.
Nature is again providing answers here. Farmers are starting to use pesticides derived from plants, which tend to be much less toxic to the surrounding environment.
They’re also using natural enemies to keep threats at bay. Some may act as repellents, “pushing” pests away. For example, peppermint disgusts the flea beetle, a scourge to oilseed rape farmers. Others are “pulls”, attracting pests away from valuable crops. Plants that are attractive for egg-laying but that don’t support the survival of insect larvae are commonly used for this purpose.
Technology is also offering solutions on this front. Some farmers are already using apps to monitor, warn and predict when pest and diseases will attack crops. Driverless tractors and intelligent sprayers that can target specific weeds or nutritional needs have recently entered the market. Agritech companies are now also developing robots that can scan fields, identify specific plants, and decide whether to use pesticide or to remove a plant mechanically.
In combination, these methods can dramatically reduce agriculture’s reliance on herbicides and pesticides without lowering crop yields. This is important, since the world’s population is set to rise by a quarter in the next three decades.
Small tech, big difference
Soon, technology at an almost impossibly small scale could make a big difference to the way we grow our food. Companies have designed nanoparticles 100,000 times smaller then the width of a human hair that release fertiliser and pesticides slowly but steadily, to minimise their use and maximise crop yields.
Nanotechnologies aren’t cheap yet and researchers have yet to conduct rigorous tests of how toxic nanomaterials are to humans and plants, and how durable they are. But should they pass these tests, agriculture will surely follow the path of other industries in adopting the technology on a large scale.
Save for nanotechnology and advanced robots, the above solutions are already in use in many small-scale and commercial farms – just not in combination. Imagine them working in synchrony and suddenly a vision of sustainable agriculture doesn’t seem so far away anymore.
Countries across the globe are trying to wind down coal production. While this will help in the battle against climate change, those communities that have specialised in coal mining may see their local job market decline or be eliminated entirely. Most of these places have mined coal for many generations. Given long-standing traditions, such communities will inevitably resist decarbonisation unless they are given appropriate reassurances regarding their economic and social survival.
We recently researched what did – and didn’t – work in coal regions of Canada, Australia and Germany. Our aim was to identify which policies have been most successful in halting the production of coal without placing the economic burden on coal workers and communities. Our results are now published in the journal Energy Policy.
Workers in extractive industries like mining or oil are often presented as the public face of opposition to environmental protection. However, research has shown that workers in “dirty” industries do tend to support environmentally friendly policies once their immediate interests are not negatively affected.
Furthermore, there is clear evidence that environmental protection and transitioning to the low-carbon economy has the potential to create employment just as much as it can cause unemployment.
The European Trade Union Institute has developed various indicators of a “just transition” away from coal – dialogue, retraining, and so on. In our paper, we used these indicators to identify what worked in our three case study areas.
Talk to each other
We found that active dialogue with communities is key. In North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, policy is jointly formulated by employees and employers, giving workers a voice which is largely equal to that of industrialists. The proportion of employees on supervisory boards is determined by the number of employees, which means there is one-third employee representation if there are more than 500 employees and parity on the supervisory board if there are more than 2,000 employees. This has meant coal mining has been gradually reduced and now nearly eliminated without major social or political upheaval.
Where dialogue does occur, it must be genuine and followed by action. In coal villages in Alberta, Canada, such as Forestburg or Wabamun, the industry did attempt to talk to workers and local officials but the structure of the talks was poorly defined, resulting in workers not trusting the decarbonisation processes.
Jobs after coal
We identified re-employment in “clean” industries as a way to maintain livelihoods. The German approach to re-employment has seen North-Rhine Westphalia reinvent itself as a leader in new energy technologies. Central to this has been a bottom-up approach involving co-operation between workers, communities, employers and government.
Essen, Germany, was once known for its coal. In 2017 it was made ‘European Green Capital’. Lukassek / shutterstock
In Victoria, the dominance of the coal industry has hindered the transition towards a lower-carbon economy. However, the establishment of the Earthworker Cooperative has provided a platform for various affected groups to establish sustainable enterprises such as Australia’s first worker-owned factory, making renewable energy appliances and components. This demonstrates how local communities can create employment and maintain profits within their area without relying on coal.
In Alberta, a number of production facilities are simply shifting from coal to gas. While this shift creates jobs outside the coal sector, it does little to secure employment overall, since natural gas extraction and production requires fewer workers than coal. For example, energy company TransAlta is converting its coal-fired Sundance power plant in Wabamun to natural gas, which means the overall workforce will be cut in half when the layoffs are complete.
Investing in people’s futures
Re-training allows workers to develop the necessary skills to work outside of the coal sector. In North Rhine-Westphalia, training programmes have targeted a number of different sectors including engineering, trades, business and technology. The industrial heartland of the Ruhr area – once the centre of Germany’s coal industry – has six new universities, 15 colleges and 60 research facilities since 1961. This Strukturwandel, or structural change, has developed a highly skilled workforce and demonstrates the potential for economic growth and diversification beyond coal.
Education and training has been made more accessible through subsidised retraining – in Alberta, through the Coal and Electricity Transition Tuition Voucher, and in Victoria through the Training Guarantee. This ensures that retraining does not place an additional burden on those facing redundancy.
Make former coal towns great again
Investing in infrastructure is a further means by which to secure sustainable transitions for workers and their families. In North Rhine-Westphalia and Victoria, government funding has primarily focused on roads and rail alongside investment in community infrastructure such as sports and recreational facilities. This ensures that former mining areas do not remain synonymous with coal production, pollution and socio-economic problems, and makes them a more attractive place for other industries to invest.
Moving away from fossil fuels such as coal is central to achieving emissions targets. This doesn’t have to create huge social unrest. With the goodwill of policymakers and through measures such as those we have identified, decarbonisation strategies can be developed and implemented while maintaining livelihoods for those directly affected.
Much of the mythology that surrounds Elvis Presley, who died 40 years ago, tends to surround his rags to riches story, his film-star looks, his outrageous stage outfits, his marriage to child bride Priscilla and his descent into overindulgence and drug addiction at his Graceland mansion. In death, Elvis has become to millions a kind of cautionary tale of celebrity, sex and scandal that has at times threatened to engulf his legacy. But perhaps the most important part of that legacy is his voice – a voice that has sold more than a billion records.
Etched into the grooves of all those records was the sound of an extraordinary singer with a range of more than two octaves, wonderful control, tone and vibrato and the ability to cross genres effortlessly. Record producer John Owen Williams says of Elvis:
People talk of his range and power, his ability and ease in hitting the high notes. But the real difference between Elvis and other singers was that he could sing majestically in any style, be it rock, country, or R&B – because he had soul. He sang from the heart. And that is what made him the greatest singer in the history of popular music.
Elvis grew up in Tupelo, Mississippi, and moved with his family to Memphis, Tennessee, when he was 15. He was immersed in the pop and country music of the time as well as the gospel sounds from his church. Beale Street in Memphis was a centre for blues and R&B so those influences would have also have been a major factor in Elvis’ musical development. As Pricilla was to explain years after his death, young Elvis’ eclectic record collection included:
Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, gospel and black music. There was rhythm and blues artist Joe Turner, Aretha Franklin, Mahalia Jackson, Chuck Berry, the Righteous Brothers … and even Duke Ellington and Glen Miller.
But it was their shared love of the star American tenor Mario Lanza, she added, “that was really the link between the two of us”. Lanza’s hugely popular “bel canto” classical tenor approach fused with the roots styles surrounding Elvis created the core of his singing style. Opera star Kiri Te Kanawa told Michael Parkinson that the young Elvis had the greatest voice she had ever heard. The tenor Placido Domingo similarly enthused in an interview in Spanish magazine Hola in 1994: “His was the one voice I wish to have had.” Welsh bass-baritone Bryn Terfel told The New York Times in 2007 that Presley was: “… very classically orientated with his voice and diction and very sincere and wanting to get everything perfect.”
Return to sender: Elvis as everyday American hero. Stamptastic via Shutterstock
Learning process
Elvis’ musical career can be divided into four eras: the early years in the 1950s singing rock’n’roll, country and gospel; the transition to pop in 1960; the renaissance years surrounding the 1968 TV Comeback Special and the still glorious melancholy of his final work in the late 1970s. But what was it about his voice that spoke so directly to so many people across this time span? Cathryn Robson, a senior lecturer in voice and music performance at the University of Westminster, said:
Elvis was technically fearless and instinctive in his use of technique. In his early material in particular it is as if his voice is finding and creating the lyrics as he is singing them.
To really understand Elvis’ sound we have to go back to the recordings. One of the hallmarks of Elvis’ vocal approach is a combination of his large range with the unusual ability to move seamlessly between his tenor and baritone voices. Combined with his range, he has great control over the placement of the voice in the different resonant centres such as the chest, head and the pharynx at the back of the mouth which affects the vocal tone. https://www.youtube.com/embed/gj0Rz-uP4Mk?wmode=transparent&start=0
The rock’n’roll classic Jailhouse Rock from 1957 features a distorted high tenor vocal combined with sloppy lyrical articulation in an explosive performance. The contrast with the pure, clean tone of Elvis’ 1960 rendition of the gospel classic Milky White Way with its great blend of resonance between the chest and head voices is clearly apparent.
The 1972 song Burning Love, Elvis’s final hit in his lifetime, features another sound altogether – a tight forceful vocal tone with the voice bursting out of his pharynx over a driving rock track.
Technical prowess
Elvis had a brilliant ability to control the attack and ending of each note. If we listen the 1954 Sun Records recording of Blue Moon of Kentucky we can hear Elvis using a technique known as “glottal onset and offset” – a technique in which the vocal folds in the larynx are closed at the start of a note and closed with extra emphasis at the end of the note – to achieve clarity of attack and an amazing rhythmic bounce in his vocal performance. That ability to drive the rhythm is also present in the 1963 hit Viva Las Vegas in which Elvis effortlessly accents the melody to give a rhythmic shape to each phrase. https://www.youtube.com/embed/ui0EgRsFVN8?wmode=transparent&start=0
The 1960 release of It’s Now Or Never marked Elvis’ transition to pop. The song was a reworking with specially commissioned lyrics of O Sole Mio, a signature hit for Mario Lanza. Alongside the operatic “bel canto” approach Elvis sings the song using a technique known as “devoicing” which creates sudden drops in the dynamic of the vocal. This allows Elvis to mark the emotional fragility in the lyric creating as Robson notes “a mix of assertiveness and vulnerability”.
A crucial element in Elvis’ sonic signature was his use of vibrato. The final Battle Hymn of the Republic’ segment of the 1972 recording of An American Trilogy features the sound of his vocal folds vibrating together in all their glory creating a sound that has been much copied in pop music but never bettered.
Elvis was much more than just a collection of vocal techniques – and as a singer had to overcome the sometimes mediocre material he was saddled with. As his legend fades we will be left with the multiple sounds of his voice: tender, aggressive, loving, uncertain, swaggering, pious and sexual – all delivered with a consummate technical virtuosity that was as much assimilated as studied. https://www.youtube.com/embed/WWVMXLSS1cA?wmode=transparent&start=0
But enough of these words. Go and listen to the recordings for yourselves – or, as Elvis sang in the 1968 movie Live A Little, Love A Little, let’s have A Little Less Conversation, A Little More Action.
Tobacco doesn’t immediately conjure up ideas of fuel for cars and planes. But that’s precisely what a three-year, $4.8m project from the US Department of Energy’s ARPA-EPETRO (Plants Engineered to Replace Oil) program aims to rectify.
The tobacco plant does not naturally produce high levels of oils in its leaves, so researchers are introducing genes from blue-green and green microalgae, plants and bacteria that would allow the plant to use photosynthesis to directly convert carbon dioxide from the air into oils which could be used as fuel.
Rather than adding to the greenhouse gas problem, this approach, if successful, is a zero-sum game – it uses CO2 from the air rather than producing it. Additionally, by creating oil directly in the plant it does away with the costly processing and conversion required in other biofuel approaches used to turn biological matter into fuels.
But why tobacco? One frequent argument against biofuels is that plants grown for fuel compete with plants grown for food, with negative impacts on food security and prices. Using tobacco, which is widely grown but has never been a food crop, side-steps the food versus fuel argument. What’s more, this approach is made more attractive because tobacco is a high biomass plant, producing large amounts of leaf mass. The more biomass produced, the more oil is available. It will also allow farmers who have been growing tobacco for generations to continue that tradition – but for a different, more meaningful, purpose (and after all, tobacco markets in Europe, the US and most other regions are shrinking).
In order to improve the oil generation in tobacco, researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California, Berkeley, have turned their attention to certain algae that are able to convert energy from sunlight into oil. The aim is then to introduce certain algal genes into the tobacco genome to add to existing pathways to enable plants to produce biofuels. Another aim is to improve photosynthetic efficiency that would allow tobacco to convert sunlight into energy even more efficiently, and thus lead to larger quantities of oil.
To introduce the new genetic material, the researchers use very small pieces of tobacco leaves to introduce the desired genes. A naturally occurring bacterium, Agrobacterium that can inject genetic material into plant cells, is used. The result is that the new genes become a heritable part of the tobacco plant. The small pieces of leaf tissue are then placed on a culture medium where only those cells containing the introduced genes are able to grow. From the seemingly dead leaf tissue arise leaves and roots from the engineered cells, ultimately resulting in a new plant, every cell of which will contain the new genetic material.
Additionally, colleagues at the Kentucky Tobacco Research and Development Center at the University of Kentucky are examining agricultural methods. Large-scale tobacco growing practices and harvesting infrastructure already exist and the KTRDC researchers are examining how these can be improved to generate greater amounts of biomass. Current improvements are focused on increasing the amount of biomass produced per acre of land, which would result in higher oil production.
A year and a half into the project, the researchers have demonstrated that the engineered plants produce the desired oils and have developed techologies to extract the oils using organic solvents. Current thinking is that bio-refineries could purchase the tobacco to extract its oil-rich content. The crude product could then be sold, as is, to existing oil refineries for use as gasoline, kerosene, or biodiesel, processed separately or blended with fossil crude oil for high volume production.
The challenge for this project now is to increase levels of oil to make the process economically competitive with other fuel-generating approaches. Much more research is needed before tobacco plants produce biofuels at commercial levels and will be available to growers – but preliminary results are encouraging. If successful, this approach provides a shortcut to producing fuels by direct conversion of CO2 into energy-dense liquid biofuels, using energy from the sun. The humble tobacco plant could become a future fuel-generating factory.
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