Commercial wind power is coming to a part of the Great Lakes region. Chicago-based Com-Ed is announcing a joint venture to create the state’s first large-scale wind farm. The utility says once it’s finished, the Crescent Ridge wind energy project will generate enough power for twenty thousand homes. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Jay Field reports:
Transcript
Commercial wind power is coming to a part of the Great Lakes region. Chicago-based
Com Ed is announcing a joint venture to create the state’s first large-scale wind farm. The utility says once it’s finished, the Crescent Ridge wind energy project will generate enough power for twenty thousand homes. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Jay Field reports:
The wind farm will be located on 2200 acres of farmland in Northern Illinois. And will feature 34 262-foot turbines,
Illinois Wind Energy and the Tomen Power Corporation will spend more than 55-million
dollars to develop the 51-megawatt farm. Com Ed will purchase its entire output of
electricity.
Commercial wind farms have already become a common part of the landscape in other
Midwestern states. But in Illinois, some state officials have felt there just wasn’t enough wind to make it a viable source of energy here.
A recent U.S. Department of Energy Study found that there’s more wind in Illinois than
state officials first thought. Stephen Noe, President of Illinois Wind Energy, says his company has three years of wind data that proves the project will be economically viable.
“Usually, wind is measured between class one and class seven. Class seven is the
best, class one is the worst. This site is at class four, which is pretty good. And the
early maps would never have predicted that you would obtain class four.”
As its turbines spin, the farm will send electricity – through a substation – to the utility’s
power grid. The Crescent Ridge wind power project is scheduled to be completed in
mid 2003.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Jay Field.
With passage of the 2002 farm bill, billions of dollars will be spent on conventional agriculture. Yet when it comes to food security, Great Lakes Radio Consortium commentator Tom Springer believes that native species hold untapped potential as a healthy and natural commercial food source:
Transcript
With passage of the 2002 farm bill, billions of dollars will be spent on conventional agriculture. Yet when it comes to food security, Great Lakes Radio Consortium commentator Tom Springer believes that native species hold untapped potential as a healthy and natural commercial food source:
If you live in rural America long enough, you will eventually meet a back-to-nature zealot like my old scoutmaster. On camping trips, he’d wait till we were really hungry, and then offer a hot helping of cleverly disguised food. After you wolfed it down, he would inevitably ask: “Hey! You wanna know what that was? Heh, heh, heh.” What it usually turned out to be was filet of carp, brisket of snapping turtle, or boiled cattail stalks. To this day, I’m suspicious of anything that’s wrapped in bacon strips.
I thought of my old scoutmaster the other day when I was wandering the produce aisle of a mega-supermarket. The coolers were filled with bizarre fruit, whose continent of origin – much less country – I could barely guess. There were star fruit, blood oranges and finger-sized bananas, and a type of citrus that was appropriately named Ugli fruit. Yet business was good. There must be plenty of people who like to sneak this stuff into salads and then announce, “Hey! You wanna know what that was?”
This exotic produce may be affordable, yet it comes to us at a considerable environmental cost. Imagine how much fossil fuel it takes to transport a mango from Indonesia to Chicago. And even though commercial produce is sprayed with pesticides, every load of fruit and vegetables we import could be host to an exotic insect or microbe that could wreak havoc on our environment. Foreign pests such as the Mediterranean fruit fly, Japanese beetle and zebra mussel were all brought to America by ships and cargo planes.
But for me, the larger truth is this: we don’t have to import strange fruits and vegetables from faraway jungles and rainforests. As any naturalist knows, the wilds of North America contain an abundance of interesting and edible native species. Consider the Juneberry. It’s a native fruit that tastes like a blueberry, only sweeter, and with a lovely hint of almond. Or how about the paw paw? It has a custardy flavor that’s a cross between strawberry and banana. Then there’s the chinkapin oak, whose sweet acorns can be roasted and eaten like almonds.
What we need, however, is more research to develop higher yielding varieties of native species. In the 1950s, it was crop experimentation that helped to create the blueberry industry. Before that, blueberries grew mainly in the wild. Since the mid 1990s, there’s been a boom in the commercial harvest of wild morel mushrooms, which are now sold internationally. So somewhere in the new $190 billion-dollar farm bill, we should make a serious investment to cultivate other wild crops that grow nowhere else but North America, and require little in the way of agrochemicals and irrigation. That’s what I call real food security.
I know there are skeptics who say that elderberries and prickly pear cactus leaves will never sell in mainstream grocery stores. But I think they’re wrong – it’s mainly a matter of marketing. A few decades ago, shoppers were introduced to a fuzzy, brown fruit known as the Chinese gooseberry. It didn’t become popular until it was reintroduced as the kiwi. We might have the same success if we come up with new names for the Saskatoon, chokecherry and other poorly branded native edibles. And if that doesn’t work? Well, we can always wrap them in bacon strips.
Tom Springer is a freelance writer from Three Rivers, Michigan.
For years, ethanol has been heralded as a renewable fuel that will help the environment while also helping Midwest farmers. But now the U.S. EPA is asking ethanol production plants to take a second look at the emissions that come from making the corn-based fuel. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Jonathan Ahl reports:
Transcript
For years, ethanol has been heralded as a renewable fuel that will help the environment while also helping Midwest farmers. But now the U.S. EPA is asking ethanol production plants to take a second look at the emissions that come from making the corn-based fuel. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Jonathan Ahl reports:
About three years ago, residents that live near the Gopher State ethanol plant near Minneapolis complained of a foul odor. The EPA investigated, and found unexpectedly high levels of pollutants including carbon monoxide, methanol and formaldehyde. That led to a seventeen-month study of selected ethanol sites in the Great Lakes region that showed other plants were also spewing out the pollutants. Ron Miller is the president of Williams Bio-Energy, an ethanol producer. He says as an industry, ethanol producers want to make things right:
“If indeed some of the plants have to make some corrective investments, I believe those will be made. I don’t think it is going to long-term harm the industry. And certainly, if we discover things that we didn’t know, then we should make those changes.”
That willingness on the part of ethanol manufacturers to comply with new emissions restrictions led the U.S. EPA to meet with ethanol producers, and ask them to make the corrections. But some groups are upset that the EPA is asking and not telling the manufacturers to clean up their act. Brian Urbaseski is a spokesperson with the American Lung Association Chicago chapter. He says the EPA needs to take a stronger stand with the ethanol industry:
“A voluntary situation can’t last forever. These plants will eventually have to follow the rules under the Clean Air Act. It’s the federal law. And the law is there for a reason, to protect public health.”
The American Lung Association thinks the ethanol industry gets a lot of breaks because it’s politically popular. They question if the current EPA action is another one of those sweetheart deals. The EPA disagrees. Tom Skinner is the director of the U.S. EPA’s region that covers most of the Great Lakes states. He says because the ethanol industry seems willing to comply with the new guidelines, he wants to give them a chance to get there without lengthy court action and fines. Skinner says the initially voluntary program may speed things up:
“The goal is being more effective environmental protection. If we can get the same environmental protection within three months or six months that would normally take us two or three years, everybody finishes ahead of the game.”
Skinner says he will not hesitate to enforce new standards with ethanol producers if they do not comply with the request. But Skinner says he doesn’t think that will be necessary. Ron Miller, the ethanol plant manager at the Williams Bio-Energy plant says it’s in the industry’s best interest to take advantage of the voluntary program and make the changes as soon as possible. He says if nothing else, it makes sense from a marketing standpoint:
“We try to bill ourselves as a clean, environmental product. We are the only renewable component in gasoline that you can drink. And so we are a very environmentally beneficial product, so we ought to be able to produce it in an environmentally sound manner.”
Miller says the whole situation doesn’t deserve the attention it has gotten and it isn’t that important. He calls it a small bump in the road toward more ethanol use. But the idea of a voluntary emissions clean up may be off to a rough start. The industry and the government are just beginning the process. The EPA and ethanol producers have yet to agree on a method to test and track pollution levels, let alone what those levels should be capped at.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Jonathan Ahl.
Some orchard farmers are facing a bad crop year. So farmers are turning to other resources on their land for income. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:
Transcript
Some orchard farmers are facing a bad crop year. So farmers are
turning to other resources on their land for income. The Great Lakes
Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:
Some fruit tree orchard owners, such as the tart cherry farmers in
northwestern Michigan, are expecting almost no crop this year. If they
also have a stand of hardwood forest – such as maple, ash, and beech
trees – on their farm, farmers are considering allowing logging. Rick
Moore is a forester in that region. He says farmers should be careful
before letting someone on their land to cut hardwood timber:
“What I encourage and landowner, any farmer, any cherry
farmer who calls me up and says someone has offered me some money
for my hardwoods, I strongly start encouraging them ‘You want to go
out and solicit bids. Through the bid process you know you will get fair
market value.'”
Moore says timber buyers are aware of the plight of the cherry farmers
and the less than reputable ones are taking advantage of the situation.
Moore says farmers should also carefully limit the tree cutting so the
timber stand is not cleared so much that it’s no longer able to produce
good trees in the future.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Lester Graham.
In some states in the Great Lakes region, it’s been a bad year for fruit trees. Some orchard owners are facing a devastating year. They’re trying to find some other source to bring in some money. One way farmers are choosing might hurt the environment and future income for the farmers. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:
Transcript
In some states in the Great Lakes region, it’s been a bad year for fruit
trees. Some orchard owners are facing a devastating year. They’re
trying to find some other source to bring in some money. One way
farmers are choosing might hurt the environment and future income
for the farmers. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham
reports:
Tart cherries are legendary in northwestern Michigan. There are cherry
festivals, cherry streets, and even some of the businesses are named in
honor of the surrounding cherry orchards.
But this year, the tart cherry crop was nearly wiped out.
(sounds of coffee shop)
On a recent Sunday morning at Barb’s Bakery in Northport, Michigan
the locals and the tourists gather for coffee and pastry. Paul Scott is
having a cup of coffee and looking through the newspaper. He’s a cherry
farmer who lives on the peninsula between Lake Michigan and Grand
Traverse Bay. He explains what happened this year to the cherry
trees…
“In early April, we had four or five days of exceptionally warm
weather. It got into the mid-80s and it pushed the vegetative growth of
the trees way past of where they should have been for that time of the
year. Subsequently, we had two devastating freezes, back-to-back, two
nights in a row.”
Compared to last year’s bumper crop, the tart cherry trees will only
produce about three-percent of the crop. Sweet cherry trees will do a
little better… with about 15 to 25-percent of the crop surviving. Scott
says farmers who still have to make their farm payments and survive
are looking for other ways to bring in some cash…
“And,
the first thing that — in a year like this — what your people do
is go look for an opportunity to sell timber if they really are jammed
and they have to have something, that’s what they’ll do.”
(truck sounds)
That’s exactly what Jim Von Holt thought about doing. Von Holt is a
fourth generation cherry farmer. As we drive on the bumpy dirt road
through his orchard, it’s hard to find a single cherry on the trees. We’re
headed to a 20-acre stand of timber, a small hardwood forest at the
back of his property…
“Maple’s predominant. Ash would be second. There’s
some cherry, beech, and a little poplin here. The maple’s what’s worth
the most.”
Von Holt says the trees here are high quality hardwoods. That could
mean some pretty good money…
“This year with absolutely, essentially no crop to sell, if
you wanted to bring the money in, this would be a good year to bring the
money in. So, yeah, it’s a money issue. I’ve always kind of looked at this
up here on this particular farm as this is just a little bit of an ace in the
hole. If times get tough — and times are tough — or get as bad as they are
this year, this was something we could come into and say ‘Now is the
time to go ahead and do this.'”
Von Holt hired a forester to help him determine which trees should be
cut now and which ones should be left standing to continue growing for
a future harvest and future income. The longer they grow, the more
valuable the trees can become.
Not everyone turns to a forester to help. The cherry farmers sometimes
just let the timber-buyer decide.
Rick Moore is the forester for the Grand Traverse and Leelanau
Conservation District. He says he encourages landowners to at least get
bids from more than one timber-buyer before agreeing to allow logging.
“Right now there are timber buyers who aware of the plight of
the cherry farmer. And there are people up here who are not so
reputable who are knocking on doors.”
And Moore says some of those loggers will take every tree that can be
harvested… especially the good maples… even if those trees should be
left standing for future harvests years down the road.
On top of that… timber-buyers are giving farmers much less for their
hardwood timber right now. Some hardwood prices have dropped to
nearly half of what they were just a few months ago. Timber buyers who
are cutting and buying trees now and then hold them until prices
rebound, could make a lot of money and leave the farmers with a lot
less income.
Jim Von Holt says that’s why he’s not cutting right now. By using a
forester to help ensure his timber stand will be around for future
selective cuts… he’s thinking about long-term income and the health of
the forest…
“So it has to be handled right. And, I’ve just watched too
many people, too many landowners in the area really take a bath on
letting just a logger come in and say ‘Hey, you know you need to cut this
place. All the 18-inch lumber needs to come out of here.’ And that’s
wrong. That’s just wrong.”
But, some of his neighbors are more worried about getting some quick
cash in a year when the tart cherry crop won’t bring in any money.
Some cherry farmers feel they just don’t have a choice.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Lester Graham.