Vetiver and mass production, second update

As promised here goes the third update regarding the

in vitro (Tissue Culture) of vetiver plants.

For the benefit of who hasn't followed the ongoing study

so far, here is a quick resume:

One of the most formidable obstacles to the spreading of the

Vetiver System, is not so much the price of the live material

used to bring to safety the territory, which is higly competitive

with other solutions (rigid structures) but more the high cost

of the skilled and non skilled workers needed to physically

plant the hedgerows and the availability of the material itself.

Say for example the energetic application: biofuels and

thermic power generation: if we imagine an hectare of plants

we will have to think to 100m rows by 200 rows, 50 cm space

between them 30 cm between plants: that makes a single

row 20 Km long formed by almost 67000 single plants.

If a single person can plant daily 1500 common nursery plants,

the need for workers goes up to 44 days/man/Ha.

The costs of this option are NOT SUSTAINABLE.

Furthermore, the average nursery plant does not have a

standard dimension and it is very difficult to mechanize

its planting.

This are the reasons that convinced me to find a professional

partner to produce high numbers of standard plants

suitable to mechanization to cut labour costs to a tenth

and reduce considerably the cost of the live material itself.

And here are the results so far obtained:

the head researcher of the production lab has confirmed that

the in vitro growth proceeds with a surprising rithm and

in little time we will be able to transfer a first lot of live

material in the greenhouse to harden: probably within July

a first consignment of 100 - 200 plants will be transferred in

Sardinia to be devised in the field. At this point it will be easy

to follow the growing speed and to document it.

More to follow.

Leachate in the groundwater

Chatting with a friend of this matter and browsing the available material of the Vetiver Network, I bumped into this PDF document that sums up the state of the art of the research and of the realizations so far existing in Australia, Thailand, China, etc.
Leachate is the "structural evil" tightly connected with the old practice of burying the garbage in landfills. It drags with it all the worst of our lifestyle: acids, hydrocarbs, solvants, ecc. It is formed in the rotten heart of landfills and when rains fill up the containment, it spills into our dishes as steaks, vegetables, pasta, ecc.
Many studies have been carried out on the theme, but structural prevention implies very high costs, not to talk about those landfills which are not authorized, uncontrolled put in place by people without a conscience..

If prevention is costly, the cure isn't.....

Biomass, a month later.

I want to show you a shot of the plants I have chosen to assess the weight of the biomass in one growing season; it was taken the 12 of August, 25 days after the first cut. The entire nursery hasn't received a single liter of irrigation water or a minute of rain since spring, nor has received fertilization. It is thriving on groundwater probably at 5 or 6 meters depth, and on the condensation of night humidity that the leaves drive onto the crown.
Consider also that the cut was done with a good month delay on the start of the growing season...

New start for biomass

Just to keep you informed, I wish to show you the regrowth obtained in one week after the cut performed to weight the biomass.

BIOMASS: first cut weight calculation

After an entire month on antibiotics, finally I managed to start the long promised weight calculation of the biomass resulting from the vetiver hedgerows in the nursery.
This calculation has been conducted on non irrigated nor fertilized hedgerows cut at 30cm height.
Today's result has been obtained choosing three sections, each two meters long, far apart from each other to have the certainty of the maximum possible variety of the subsoil within the land's capabilities (acquifer depth, soil type, past cultivation's residues, etc.) averaging then the weights obtained.
The weighted biomasses (accurate to 100g) are only relative to the first cut, therefore the winter vegetation and the spring one relative to rows planted 14 monts ago, so only just adult.
The sites have been individuated in a precise way so that next cuts will only regard the single plants allready considered.
Here is the data:

site 1 - 6.5 Kg
site 2 - 7.7 Kg
site 3 - 9.8 Kg

AVERAGE 8 Kg

EACH METER Kg 4

If we imagine to have 100m long hedgerows 50cm apart, the total weight would be 80.000Kg/ha
of mixed biomass dry and green more or less at 50%

With non irrigated young plants......

Seeking basin lagoons

While trying to deepen my understanding of the vetiver potential to clean up wastewaters and at the same time to produce biomasses for the energy industry, I want to start a new course of studies which would imply the usage of one or more floating pontoons on any of the thousand lagoons existing in Italy, therefore I'm now seeking volounteers of any sort (private enterprises of public administrations willing to host these structures and follow them up, to cut the leaves and weight them in the growing season.

Anyone willing to contribute, can find me through the site Vetiver Sardegna or this blog.

Good start

In Sardinia we have a research center that studies biotechnological applications in the food industry, in biomedicine and the environment.
Useful trip that can be done from home.
BIOTECNE: CONSORZIO PER LE RICERCHE E LO SVILUPPO DELLE BIOTECNOLOGIE

Now I watch

Time goes by, seasons do their cycle and my plants grow;
I keep observing their behaviour with critical eye noticing the influence that soil and climate have on it: In Gallura (Sardynia north east) we have loose soils given by the granites of the area therefore sub acid, some concentrated rains in autumn and spring and drought, severe at times for the rest of the year.
It was allready the end of 2002 and further ahead lied the coldest winter of the past twenty years. It was severe, minimum temperatures dropped below zero for ten days in a row, the aerial part of the plants became a straw wig, I tought I lost them..On the other hand but, if they are not suited to the purpouse, better to know straight away.
I keep listening

In the field

We're now in 2000; now the necessity that arises is:where do I put all this plants? My garden is full of pots and this plants go very fast.
Domenico offers me to put them in the end section of his land since that is often submerged and the alfalfa (medicago sativa) he grows on eight hectares does not germinate in there; on the other hand, in that same section, me and Rodrigo have been coltivating "rucola" for the whole summer.
I move them to their new accomodation and I transplant the containers to obtain a first study row of some eighty meters.
Soon the plants develope a robust root system that breaks up the compacted subsoil underneath the plough reach, so that the winter after, despite strong rains, the section is free from the usual pools. BAH!

The plants' arrival

One day that I find myself in Catania in 1999, the good Sardo, goes to work with a hoe and dumps in the trunk of his car more or less70 kg of vetiver clumps Monto variety and he delivers it in the hall of my hotel (I'll never be grateful enough to him).
I load it on a mercedes taxi making in the trunk the same disaster Sardo did in the hall, and we leave towards the airport. I load the lot in the front hold of the Md80 run by Francesco "ciccio" Angeleri of the Meridiana company (a living mith).
The plants arrive in Olbia and I take them home. Soon I start dividing and I produce some 50 20x20 containers.
I start observing.

Turning point: the vetiver

After several tries, and almost two years of research, I find on the web this perennial erbaceous plant that satisfies all the conditions when planted in rows.
I get in touch with the network run by a bunch of enthusiasts and I find out that at the moment the plant is being studied by the National Italian Concil for Research (CNR) at the Catania University (Sicily) in order to generate power with it.
I therefore get in touch with professor Sardo who runs the research, a tall red haired man, living memory of past invasions in his land, charismatic person who also conducts studies on salt tollerance and other factors like phitodepuration applications.
And I start hassling him.

Back to the drawing board

Then I have to start again from the charateristics that the hedge has to produce: low weed potential, capability of maintaning the design, massive vertical root system, capability of sustaining all environmental adversities (fire,cold, drought, submersion, etc.) different soil pH, good palatability for ruminants.
Given theese keywords, I start the search again.

Which solution?

Once decided the method, I set out to decide on the context,
I start considering hundreds of different plants in order to obtain that hedge effect that can reduce erosion. I search textbooks but soon I realize that hedges have to be composed by several kinds of plants,to obtain the beneficial effect of helping the farm economy, adaptability to all terrains and good palatability are conditions which I couldn't abide.The next problem to face is how to maintain the planting design of the hedges in time and how avoid that different species interfere with each other using as little space as possible

Leave Rome behind

In december 1995 I move to Sardinia, ancient land for the ancients allready, soon I realize that there is an enormous environmental problem of erosion, loss of fertility and hydrogeology due both to deforestation, occourred in the past centuries, and obsolete agricoltural techniques. I set out to find a solution with precise connotations: to reduce erosion and consolidate while producing earnings for the farm economy.
The orientation of this search goes immediately towards vegetative barriers, for their dinamicity and their ease of moltiplication with wirtually no cost and possible multiple side income.

1995 All Starts

All started in1995 when I came back to Italy after a degree in TV production in Australia at Charles Sturt University in Wagga Wagga.
The final work I presented was a naturalistic documentary and its title was: "Alternatives to conventional agricolture".
I never thougth I could find my path this way