By Becky Striepe •
October 28, 2008
[image credit: Jelle at Flickr under a Creative Commons license]
Researchers at Michigan State University are working on technology that could help small farms transform animal waste from pollutant to fuel. Through funding from both public and anonymous, private sources, MSU is planning an Anaerobic Digestion Research and Education Center. The Center will test methods for efficiently using bacteria to turn animal waste into biogas, which farms can in turn use in place of fossil fuels for things like electricity and heat. The aim is to make this an affordable option for small- to mid-sized farms. This technology simultaneously addresses two issues that farmers face: farm waste management and increased energy prices.
By Carol Gulyas •
April 13, 2008
As we pointed out in an earlier posting, one of the problems with biofuels such as corn-based ethanol is that they are diverting food crops from food source to fuel source. Miriam Sticklen, a crop and soil scientist from Michigan State University, announced this week that she has used an enzyme from a cow’s stomach to create a new strain of corn.
This new kind of corn, in an ideal scenario, would allow the kernels to be used as food, while the (formerly) wasted part of the corn plant could be converted to biofuel. A gene from a cow’s stomach, one of the most effective digesters of plant sugars in the world, is implanted into a corn cell using genetic engineering, fundamentally changing the corn plant. As reported in Biofuels Journal:
