Productivity Potential of Bioenergy Crops from the Sun Grant Regional Feedstock Partnership

In 2013 a series of meetings was held across the US with each of the Sun Grant Regional Feedstock Partnership crop teams and the resource assessment team, led by the Oregon State University and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, to review, standardize, and verify energy crop yield trials from 2007-2012 and assimilate their outcomes into a national model of biomass yield suitability. The meetings provided a way to “ground truth” yield estimates in order to accurately capture interactions of climate and soils for dedicated energy crops, including energycane, upland and lowland switchgrass, biomass sorghum, CRP grasses, hybrid poplar, willow, pine, and miscanthus x giganteus (in 2014). The verification of yield data included generating a standardized set of management assumptions for each crop and summarizing site potential yield according to the agreed cultural practices to establish, manage, and harvest each crop. From these sets of funded trials and historical data, yield was estimated across spatial gradients according to soil characteristics and climate history at a 2-week interval. The resulting national grids provide critical information for policymakers and planners of the potential productivity of these pre-commercial crops. This document summarizes the crop model and county-level results from the mapping activities (draft of document, July 31, 2014)