 Dr. Randy Powell, MSU Dean of Agriculture Dr. Tony Brannon and Pete Nelson - field to factory biomass on the horizon It is no secret that the ninety eight counties in the Mississippi River Delta region from Mississippi up to Kentucky have bled manufacturing jobs for decades. Making things has moved from the mid South to countries like India and China. Despite the outgush of industry, too many economic development efforts continue to focus on old smokestack factory jobs. Industrial parks are as ubiquitous as soybean fields. The great majority of these parks double as soybean, corn or row crop fields while they wait for the next Toyota or Honda to discover the joys of locating on a big hunk of flat land in the geographic heart of America.
The holy grail of economic development is an idea that cannot/will not migrate to cheaper labor and laxer environmental enforcement. Creating factory jobs that pay wages above the subsistence level hourly rates currently paid by the country’s largest employer (think Smiley Face here) has occupied day and night dreams of development experts, elected officials and regular joes and janes who deplore seeing the region they love depopulate to the coasts.
Up until last Tuesday evening, there seemed to be no way to get the dream fulfilled. A group of researchers, university types, development specialists and yes, farmers, have come up with what they think might be the answer.
And that answer is “biomass”.
You may be reminded as we were of the famous scene is "The Graduate" when a drunken businessman tells Dustin Hoffman that the future is “plastics”. As silly as it sounded at the time, it turned out the drunk was right. A great majority of what we use every day, from the lipstick that’s worn off my mouth this late in the day to the iced tea glass at lunch to the aspirin bottle I reached for before starting this story all are plastic. The problem is that plastic is made from petroleum. Petroleum is a finite resource. Petroleum from fossil based fuels will run out. Maybe not today or tomorrow or ten years from now. But it will run out. We don’t have a few million years to wait for Mother Nature to produce more.
With other countries in the world competing head to head with the US for this scarce resource, it is becoming more urgent every day to get serious about finding an alternative to petroleum.
Repopulating the Mississippi Delta with good jobs and replacing petroleum products with a renewable resource is an idea whose time has come. That’s the idea in a study called “Regional Strategy for Biobased Products in the Mississippi Delta”. A joint effort of five states, Arkansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, and Tennessee, focusing on 98 counties along Old Man River, with corporate, nonprofit and educational sponsors, and coordinated by Memphis Bioworks Foundation, the project predicts that:
“…within two decades, it is reasonable to anticipate a total impact within the 98-county region approaching 50,000 total (direct plus indirect) jobs through a maturing industrial bioprocessing products economy.”
The researchers looked at the kinds of crops that will provide income to the area soonest. Both perennials, like switchgrass, and annuals, like sweet sorghum, have potential. Sweet s orghum is particularly attractive because it fits into the familiar scheme of row crop rotation. Oilseed crops that can be crushed, like sunflower and winter canola, are also promising.
At the meeting, the presenters, Peter Nelson and Dr.Randy Powell were careful to emphasize that biomass isn’t going to deliver crop checks to farmers tomorrow or pay checks to factory workers next week. Unlike the rush to ethanol, the researchers advocate small steps to development. Start with demonstration projects and small factories, then get larger and bolder.
The true beauty of biomass is that it does not lend itself to regional extraction. Biomass factories must be close to biomass fields. Factories to render biomass products into usable forms, say pellets for heating systems, should be located close to the growing site. And that’s good news indeed for economic development on a local scale.
The presenters didn’t gloss over the problems. State and national policies must get aligned. State to state policies that create competition must create cooperation. Crops know no state line and the 98 counties of the Mississippi Delta have more in common with each other than with parts of their own states with different ecosystems. Money will be an issue. This is not an area for a quick buck, so venture capital firms will have to be lured out by profitable demonstration projects. The tech isn’t quite there yet. Farm equipment has become highly specialized. The tractor add on that harvests corn isn’t the right part for sweet sorghum harvest. Farming is a highly mechanized activity and the tools for new crops have to be available to get the new crops into the fields, out again and to the biomass factory.
The jobs of the future in biomass look more like chemical factory jobs. Post secondary education will be needed. Arkansas is a leader in the area, with a curriculum in process.
The project team sees four near to midterm bioprocessing opportunities: co-firing biomass in regional coal-fired power plants; introduction of specialty oilseed crops and local crusing facilities; development of sweet sorghum based ethanol production and the introduction of lignocellulosic-based ethanol.
If biomass lives up to its promise, the result will be an $8 billion dollar biofuels and biobased products industry with affecting the food and feed chain.
That’s worth dreaming about.
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