Nov012009
Instant fertilizer: Farmer injects tractor’s carbon into the ground
Filed under Alternative energy by david brooks at 9:31 am
A system called Bio-Agtive under development by a Canadian firm takes exhaust from big, honking farm tractors, cools it to 30 degrees C., then expels it into the soil as gas fertilizer while the tractor is sowing a crop. It sounds too good to be true, or at least too good to be practical, but you never know. (I suspect that it only makes financial sense for very large fields of crops, which need very large tractors - the sort of farm that doesn’t exist in New England.)
Here’s a story from an Australian newspaper about a farmer trying it out; here’s a story from Farmers Weekly; and for those who read Chinese, here’s an article from China Agricultural Machinery Herald.
The technology is completely different, but the general idea - take “waste” from modern agriculture and use it immediately, on site - is similar to Portsmouth’s Microgy, which make machines that use manure from dairy farms to generate “biogas” for various power applications.
November 2nd, 2009 at 8:57 am
Great idea it it works. Really isn't Carbon sequestration since CO2 is not permanently removed from the environment but reduction in fertilizer use has great environmental benefit.