At Gevo, we create a variety of fuels from bio-based feedstocks. But not all feedstocks are created equal.
We work with farmers who are focused on regenerative agriculture—a farming method that works within the circular systems of nature to not just harvest from the soil, but replenish it at the same time.
Regenerative agriculture focuses on building soil health through the use of techniques like cover crops, reduced tillage, no-till, crop rotation, nutrient management, manure, incorporating livestock, and much more. By utilizing the power of nature’s processes, regenerative farmers can improve yields, reduce soil erosion, and decrease the use of synthetic fertilizers and energy-intensive equipment.
Why Regenerative Agriculture?
We already know that bio-based renewable fuels made from American-grown feedstock, go a long way to enhancing efficiency. How that feedstock was grown matters, too.
Conventional agriculture makes frequent use of pesticides, insecticides, fertilizers, and tillage to grow crops like corn. While these processes can often help guarantee yields, they are also incredibly energy intensive.
In contrast, regenerative agriculture not only reduces reliance on pesticides and fertilizers but maintains the integrity of the soil. This, in turn, expands the crop’s capacity for building organic matter in the soil—meaning the soil gets better with every corn stalk.
Regenerative agriculture has the potential to increase yields with lower costs while working to make the soil better. Regeneratively grown corn and other cash crops can also garner higher prices for farmers, making regenerative feedstocks a win-win for farmers, consumers, and the bio-based renewable fuels industry.
Regenerative Agriculture Starts in the Soil
Soil health is the cornerstone of a regenerative cropping system. Finding the right balance of nutrients allows farmers to improve yields, diminish pests, reduce soil erosion, and increase soil resilience. Soil contains billions of microbes, bacteria, fungal networks, and living organisms that make up the soil ecosystem.
Crops like corn need a specific balance of nutrients, such as nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, to maintain high yields. Practices like over-application of pesticides, insecticides, and fertilizers or consistent soil tillage can destroy the fragile network of living things within the underground soil layer, cutting off their linkage to the plants.
Healthy soil containing a variety of microorganisms can encourage increased organic content when combined with a plant’s photosynthetic process, allowing crops like corn to feed people and animals and produce bio-based renewable fuels.
That’s why Gevo partners with regenerative farmers to produce our feedstock—because when you invest in the soil, you get results.
Regenerative agriculture techniques
What are the building blocks of regenerative agriculture, and how might it be different from the farms you know? Take a look at just some of the ways the regenerative farmers working with Gevo do things a little differently:
Reduced Tillage Keeps the Soil Sound
Regenerative agriculture is founded on working with the processes of nature, and nowhere is nature more efficient than the soil microbiome. By reducing tillage on their fields, regenerative farmers can expect to see the following benefits:
- Improved yields: Researchers at Stanford University found that corn yields improved by an average of 3.3 percent in fields managed with conservation tillage.
- Strengthened soil structure: Reducing tillage preserves soil aggregates, leaving large macro pores in the soil that allow for water infiltration, soil resiliency, air exchange, and reduce soil erosion.
- Decreased erosion: By leaving the soil covered with residue, this helps to reduce the impacts of wind and water erosion on the soil. With reduced tillage, this allows the soil aggregates to remain in place allowing water to infiltrate and reducing runoff. Increasing residue cover in a field from 0 to 41 percent reduces soil loss by 9.2 tons per acre.
- Carbon added to soil: In a Minnesota study, tilling a wheat field, which then promotes the breakdown of organic matter and disturbs the soil microbiome, led to over 3,800 pounds of carbon dioxide leaching into the atmosphere.
- Reduced field passes: With reduced tillage, farmers run their tractors over their fields fewer times, meaning reduced soil disturbance, and lower fuel demands.
- Water Storage: Increased water infiltration rates and water-holding capacity lead to the soil being able to accept and retain water more efficiently and make it available to support plant growth.
Compost Helps Create a Circular Soil Economy
The main purpose of composting is to build soil organic matter, putting nutrients back into the soil. A combination of deep tillage, erosion events, and intensive cropping systems has compounded nutrient depletion within the soil.
One study in California showed that when compost was combined with cover cropping in an organic system, soil carbon content increased by 0.07 percent a year (an annual increase that exceeds the current recommendation of “4 per 1000” for food security and climate called for by the United Nations).
Like many regenerative agriculture techniques, the application of compost to farm fields has numerous benefits:
- Increased resistance to climate-related weather events like drought or heat waves
- Increased soil organic matter that can support greater yields, water retention, and soil structure
- Addition of macro- and micronutrients to the soil
- Enables reduction of synthetic fertilizer applications
- Suppression of soilborne diseases
- Reduction of animal feed due to increased plant growth on rangelands
Crop Rotation: The Right Crops at the Right Time
Planting the same crop in the same place every year, known as monoculture, not only draws vital nutrients out of the soil but also encourages pests and pathogen issues. Through crop rotation, pests that plant their eggs on the leaves or roots of a host crop hatch the next year to find that their host food source has been removed, thereby breaking the pest cycle that plagues many farmers.
According to The Center for Regenerative Agriculture and Resilient Systems at California State University, Chico, crop rotation has myriad benefits, including:
- Increased soil quality, fertility, and organic carbon
- Improved soil microbiology
- Increased biodiversity
- Reduced need for pesticides and fertilizers
- Increased carbon addition to the soil of farm fields
A key concept to remember is that crop rotation helps improve yields. Studies have shown that corn grown in a two-year rotation with soybeans yields 5 to 20 percent more than growing corn year after year.
For Gevo, that means every corn stalk planted can provide more high-quality animal feed and feedstocks for bio-based renewable fuel, reducing the total amount of land needed to produce sustainable fuels.
Corn and the Carbon Cycle
Gevo expects to use inedible field corn as feedstock to make bio-based renewable fuels and chemicals and there are numerous reasons why it works:
- There’s plenty of corn around. We look for facility sites situated amid thousands of acres of cornfields, such as many existing ethanol plants. That means reduced transportation cost (and emissions) to get the corn to the plant.
- Growing corn is a science, and, while the weather and other conditions affect yield, it produces a huge biomass growth over the course of the three- to four-month growing season, and a big part of that is carbon drawn from the atmosphere through photosynthesis.
- Once a plant is online, farmers will deliver their corn harvest, where it will be separated into its components, and the starch goes to the fermentation process to make biofuel, while the protein becomes animal feed.
- Strip-tilling means the farmers leave the roots of last year’s crop and plow a very narrow row between. As the root ball of each stalk decays in the ground, its carbon becomes part of the soil.
- High-protein animal feed helps livestock be healthier and also produce nutrient-rich manure that is then spread over the fields, preventing the farmer from needing to buy synthetic fertilizer and pay a crew to spread it.
