Emily Heaton
Prairie potholes?! What are they? Prairie potholes are low-lying, poorly drained soils that are prone to flooding. The...
In the interview, “A Farmer’s Journey with Miscanthus: Part 1,” we learned about Steve Schomberg and his involvement with growing miscanthus for the University of Iowa power plant. Steve has also been working with Koch Angus Farms, a cattle production farm near Letts, Iowa for the last four...
Growing up on his family’s farm, Steve Schomberg learned the importance of environmentalism by his father. Conservation and sustainability remained central to Steve’s life while he worked at the University of Illinois, which is where he first learned about miscanthus and its use as a biomass...
By Madelynn Connell and Emily Heaton
Many people in the Midwest have recently experienced the bitter-cold temperatures brought on by arctic air falling into the mid-latitudes. While these temperatures can make people rather uncomfortable, they are also potentially dangerous to miscanthus...
Wisconsin has been proudly known as America’s Dairyland for many years. However, recent data on dairy farms in the Driftless Region (Figure 1)...
Register for the University of Iowa Biomass Fuel Project Update Meeting!
Friday December 13th @ 10-11:30AM (public meeting)
Linn County Extension Office
383...
Miscanthus has to be harvested all at once and must be stored for later use every season. Standing miscanthus fields are harvested with a forage chopper or self-propelled mower conditioner (as previously discussed in our...
Have you been driving in rural eastern Iowa lately? You might have noticed those choppers and wagons a few weeks ago harvesting miscanthus fields, but what have you seen most recently? Planters! You might have noticed that they don’t look like the grain planters most of us are used to seeing....
If you have been driving in rural eastern Iowa and noticed a lot of choppers and wagons, you might have been seeing the UI Biomass Fuel Project Miscanthus harvest.
Today, we will take a quick trip around the world to explore how other cultures have used miscanthus. East Asian cultures incorporated miscanthus into their everyday lives: paintings, toys, household items, rituals, and in some cases medicinal uses.
Welcome to ISU Biomass, led by the Heaton Lab at Iowa State University. Together with our partners, we work to integrate perennial crops into the annual crop landscape to improve economic, environmental, and social outcomes. One of our focus areas is the production and ecophysiology of giant...