Perennial wild plant mixtures as biogas substrate - The establishment matters

Publikations-Art

Poster

Autoren

von Cossel, M., Steberl, K., Möhring, J., Kiesel, A., Lewandowski, I.

Erscheinungsjahr

2017

Tagungsname

Progress in Biogas IV

Tagungsort

Stuttgart-Hohenheim

Tagungsdatum

08.-11.03.2017

Schlagworte

Biodiversität, Biogas plants, cropping systems

Silage maize (Zea mays L.) for use as biogas substrate is cultivated on ca. 900,000 ha in Germany and it produces 60% of the biogas energy generated. Intensive maize cultivation can have several ecological and social impacts in some regions whenever best practices for its cultivation are ignored. Thus, alternative cultivation systems are required allowing to replace maize on sites being not easy to manage with maize. Besides grassland, other perennial cultures such as Sida (Sida hermaphrodita L. Rusby) or cup plant (Silphium perfoliatum L.) can act as a carbon sink and have both a higher ecological and social value compared to maize. But they are both expensively to establish and potentially susceptible to diseases and pests. Perennial wild plant mixtures (WPM) are expected to meet both the economic and the ecological/social needs more efficiently than other perennial cropping systems. But the WPM yield levels remain uncompetitive to maize or whole crop cereal silages. Therefore, we investigated different establishments to optimize the WPM methane yield performance. The establishment method was found to be a promising cultivation factor for optimizing the methane yield potential of WPM without loss of ecological/ social benefits. However, the economic costs for the WPM based increase of agro-biodiversity need careful site-specific consideration.