Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Zoom w a View: Corn (and fuel?) is disappearing from the fields

I motorcycled to Ports Burwell and Bruce yesterday and could have stopped twenty times to snap photos of soy and cornfields carved in straight lines.

Soybeans will occasionally shoot like hard bullets against my windshield.


Thankfully, cobs of corn don’t stray as far as the road.

The sight of vast fields caused me to stop more than once and as I walked across an open stretch I was amazed at the amount of debris left behind.


It crunched underfoot and I wondered if it could be used as fuel of some sort.

Could it be compressed and burned in small stoves for example?

I’ve planned a few winter projects using wood from the Dorchester dump and I’d enjoy using dry stalks and cobs to heat my shed.

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Can corn debris be used as fuel?

Aren’t there such things as corn (kernel) stoves?

Wouldn’t annual plant debris be measured in millions of tonnes?

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3 comments:

Anonymous said...

What lovely photos. I bet the corn husks would burn and maybe they would compost too? I wonder if the outer leaves could be used for paper-making as well. They'd certainly be good for lighting fires, all dried out like that.

G. Harrison said...

hi kirsty,

thank you for your visit from the UK.

we grow so much corn and soy in my area, southern Ontario, for cattle feed, food additives etc., that the amount of debris would seem staggering.

necessity is the mother of invention and perhaps soon we will have better corn stoves on the market.

cheers,

gord h.

Unknown said...

Around here, some farmers turn the cattle into the corn fields late in the year. They clean up the stuff that's left after harvesting, and are quite happy to do so.