Letting the grass grow was a hot topic Wednesday at the Wayne Conservation District meeting.
The focus of the discussion was a mobile pelletzing machine which will convert switch grass into a heating source.
“The pelletizer is going to be used to pelletize something that we can grow — which is switch grass,” says Wayne Conservation District Manager Bob Muller, Jr. Compressing switch grass into pellet form via the pelletizer, to be used as a heating source, is environmentally friendly, he said. “It’s a renewable energy, clean burning, no fossil fuels,” he said.
Growing switch grass has it’s own benefits, he said. “It’ll offer cover for wildlife. Switch grass doesn’t need a lot of fertilizer, so that means there’s not a lot of fertilizer placed on the ground, to leach into the water. It’s a way for farmers to maybe fit into a different kind of income — a different area of income,” he said. Muller said he could see grain, dairy or beef farmers supplementing their income by growing switch grass, pelletizing it and selling it or, “maybe just to heat their own property, there own house,” he said.
Muller says the Benton Area School District in Columbia County is modifying it’s heating system to be fully reliant on pellets, resulting in a significant energy savings for the school district, which had been gas fired, he said.
Landowners could benefit
Landowners, whose fields are lying unused, could benefit, says David Kennedy, Nutrient Management Specialist with the Wayne Conservation District. “It’s a possibility they could plant switch grass, make some money off their land, yet it remains open and non-developed. There’s a lot of fields that aren’t being hayed or harvested or anything,” he said.
With switch grass, Muller said, “Every year they can go out and cut the grass just like you do a lawn ...but it’s going to be tall. Cut it, dry it, bail it, pellet it. When they do wood pellets, they’re using some faster growing hard woods, but it takes that tree 15 to 20 years to get to a size where they’re going to make it into wood pellets. This, we’re going to make pellets every year on the same fields,” Muller said.
“You don’t have to replant it every year — just harvest it. Just like a regular hay field,” Kennedy said. Kennedy described the switch grass pellets as, “Basically, hay that’s going to get ground up and then formed into a pellet and then the pellets would be burned for heat. If you’ve ever seen rabbit food, that’s pretty much what it looks like. It looks like little, rabbit food pellets.”
