(July 7, 2015) We ask a lot of the land: feed the world with crops, power
the world with bioenergy, retain nutrients so they don’t pollute our water and
air. To help landscapes answer these high demands, scientists from the U.S.
Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory are designing ways to
improve—and hopefully optimize—land use.
In collaboration with the farming community of the Indian
Creek Watershed in central Illinois, these researchers are finding ways to
simultaneously meet three objectives: maximize a farmer’s production, grow
feedstock for bioenergy and protect the environment. These goals, as it turns
out, are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
All it takes is a multifunctional landscape, where resources
are allocated efficiently and crops are situated in their ideal soil and
landscape position. Planting bioenergy crops like willows or switchgrass in
rows where commodity crops are having difficulty growing could both provide
biomass feedstock and also limit the runoff of nitrogen fertilizer into
waterways — all without hurting a farmer’s profits. This is what a group of
Argonne scientists has discovered through careful data collection and modeling
at a cornfield in Fairbury.
“The issue we’re working to address is how to design bioenergy
systems that are sustainable” said Cristina Negri, principal agronomist and
environmental engineer at Argonne. “It’s not idealistic. We wanted to show that
it’s doable; if we design for specific outcomes, we’ll see real results.”