Joint Center for Transportation Sustainability Research Goes to the Farm Belt

The ITS Berkeley Online Magazine Summer 2006: Volume 2, Number 2

Berkeley Transportation Sustainability Researchers Journey to the Center of the Farm Belt

A team from the new Berkeley Joint Center for Transportation Sustainability Research heads to the country's heartland to examine sustainable corn- and soybean- farming methods.

One of the first undertakings of the new Joint Center for Transportation Sustainability Research is a summer research trip to Minnesota and Nebraska by center graduate students, Andy Jones and Rich Plevin, and Professor of Public Policy Michael O'Hare.

Nebraska cropland planted in corn for 2003. (source: U.S. Department of Agriculture Cropland Data Layer.)

The center, which was announced in May 2006, was formed as a partnership among six UC Berkeley campus research groups— the University of California Transportation Center, the University of California Energy Institute, ITS Berkeley, the Energy and Resources Group, the Center for Global Metropolitan Studies, and the Berkeley Institute of the Environment. Its Director is Alex Farrell, assistant professor in the Energy and Resources Group, and it is housed at ITS Berkeley.

How Fuels Are Best Grown

The object of the week-long trip is to learn more about methods for growing sustainable fuel crops. The Berkeley team will visit a farm in southwest Minnesota where 5,000 acres of soybeans and corn are grown and harvested according to a set of sustainability principles. The corn is processed into ethanol; the soybeans are used to produce bio-diesel.

They will also inspect a dry mill ethanol facility as well as a mill integrated with a feed lot, where a byproduct of corn is fed to cows whose manure is used to produce methane to fuel the processing plant.

In an unusual allliance across disciplines and institutions, the team will visit researchers at the University of Nebraska who have developed an experimental corn field, Farrell noted.

This kind of research is part of the center's initial emphasis on the sustainability of transportation energy production as the transition away from traditional petroleum sources takes place. "We have already made the point that agricultural practices are really important for transportation research," Farrell said, in light of the role that biofuels are likely to play.

As part of the biofuels research effort, the center will be hosting regular biofuels seminars this fall to bring together researchers from the numerous departments on the Berkeley campus where work on this issue is going on.

"So many different people at the university are working on various aspects related in some way to sustainable energy that one of our first goals is to bring them together to exchange information through seminars," added Farrell.

To learn more about the center, go to the Web site of the Joint Center for Transportation Sustainability Research at UC Berkeley.