Cows, Whisky and Corn

Perhaps there is nothing new under the sun except a new audience or a new opportunity for old ideas?

So what is possible when it comes to producing Energy, Food and jobs and keeping money local?

I covered the uses and advantages of alcohol as a fuel in my previous post. So how can it all play out? Lets start with Corn, we all have some idea how much corn is grown in this country and plenty others. So lets say you take the corn or some other grain and ferment it and then distill out the alcohol for fuel. Then what you have left is mash, this mash has a lower carbohydrate content than it did before before fermentation and this actually makes it more suitable as cow food (and other animals). Cows eating distillers mash is not anything new,you can see some of the nutritional data at this link provided.
http://ohioline.osu.edu/as-fact/distillers.html
http://pubstorage.sdstate.edu/AgBio_Publications/articles/ExEx2036.pdf

So we feed the mash to the live stock as part of their diet and naturally they produce waste. One of the qualities of cow manure is that it is actually ideal for producing methane or natural gas. So once again we have an opportunity to recover fuel, but this is a fuel that we already use for heating, cooking, and in vehicles.There is even a proven technology available converts methane into electricity without combustion. link This sort of technology is a good alternative to reducing future electricity costs that can compete quite well with solar and wind.

Once the cow manure is fermented once again and the bacteria has produced the methane the manure is now ready to be used as fertilizer. So it can be used to grow more corn or some other crop.

This cycle may be more expensive or less convenient in some cases then using commercial fertilizers or large industrial production of fuel or crops but it does offer the opportunity to do all these processes on a local level keeping the money local, the regulation local and it also offers better pollution controls.

There are many sources for the ideas in this post, i will add the links in for people to do their own home work. I hope everyone keeps in mind that it is hard to find anyone that we agree with 100%, so don’t be too quick to discount everything based on minor misalignments.

Guys like David Blume have been talking about small scale alcohol production for a long time and he wrote a book that has been kind of the gold standard for a long time.
http://alcoholcanbeagas.com/

Robert Zubrin also has had a lot to say on the subject
http://energyvictory.net/

http://www.waff.com/story/20537445/company-to-create-electricity-using-methane-gas-in-dekalb-co

http://smarterfuelfuture.org/impacts/vehicles-and-small-engines?gclid=CLTl47bE8LQCFUdxQgodb3YARg