Willow Biomass Resources from Cornell

10/20/2012

Hi folks
We recently spent some time exploring some fantastic on-line resources on coppiced willow biomass production for heat and electricity from the Cornell College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. While we plan to only truly skim the surface of short rotation biomass coppice systems in our book, the fine folks at Cornell (amongst others) have done much to help develop the state of the art for growers in North America.

While short rotation forestry (SRF) presents a different scale and end product than much of what we'll be exploring in Coppice Agroforestry, we absolutely believe there's strength in diversity and that these systems may be of direct application to some of your lives and livelihoods. Check out the videos below to learn a bit more about the types of the planting and harvesting equipment used to manage these systems and marvel at the ingenious technology that's gone into their development.

http://willow.cals.cornell.edu/videos.html#video10

Best wishes and happy autumn,

Mark and Dave

7 Comments

Matthew Banchero link

1/2/2013 10:38:32 am

I really like the potential of using willow. You can harvest when the leaves drop, so the majority of the cycling minerals stay in the system.

I do worry about the potential for soil mining if big agribusiness decided this is commercially viable. Anytime you do intensive biomass harvesting of the same crop for an extended period of time you have the potential to deplete the soil. Introducing live stock or adding compost would be essential to be truly sustainable.

I'd love to run the willow chips through a biochar machine and then reintroduce the char back into the soil. If you were able to do that several times you could sequester a huge amount of carbon. Since the carbon stays stable in the soil, even if you only did it once every 10 harvests...in 100 years you would have added more than enough to increase the site's yield for the next thousand years.

Mark Krawczyk link

1/13/2013 10:59:24 pm

Great points Matthew - you're absolutely right. Harvesting post-leaf fall means much of the stand's nutrient uptake gets cycled directly back to the soil. I've been polishing up chapter 3 in our book these past couple of weeks (the chapter on the 'Ecological and Biology of Woody Plants and Coppice') and one stat I recently came across of absolutely relevance is that 'forest stands return 60-80% of their annual nutrient uptake to the soil'.

That said, as you say, there's still a need to return those nutrient's immobilized by plants and removed from the site upon harvest (the remaining 20-40%) if we're not to overtax the site's fertility budget, and biochar seems like one of the most promising and site-appropriate ways to do it.

Great post! Thanks so much for sharing

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8/6/2013 06:59:35 pm

The Cornell College of agriculture and life science is doing a great job by the work they are doing in the willow biomass resources. This page is giving a good detail about the work they are doing. Thanks a lot for sharing this page.

Mark Krawczyk link

8/7/2013 01:13:40 am

Yes they are doing great work. Glad you enjoyed it

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9/22/2013 08:45:41 pm

Great technologies you have used but could you tell us which planting and harvesting equipment you have used.

Joey Atlas link

10/1/2013 03:46:30 pm

Cheers man! Very useful Article! :)

Zoe link

1/16/2014 06:59:49 pm

Your blog is really very interesting. I am totally impressed with your blog. So keep posting. thanks

Willow Biomass Resources from Cornell

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