Relevant

Lancaster: When everybody farmed with draft animals, American farmers used about 20 percent of their land to grow feed for their beasts of burden. Farms supplied their own energy. Glen Cauffman sees that kind of self-sufficiency returning to agriculture's not-so-distant future. Cauffman, who manages Penn State's farm operations, shared his vision with the the Ag Issues Forum on March 12, 2009, a monthly event sponsored by the Lancaster Chamber of Commerce and Industry at the Farm and Home Center.

Cauffman is excited about the potential for alternative fuels, and told the forum that Penn State is already in the forefront of this emerging technology. Tractors, trucks and utility vehicles on the University Park campus are already burning used cooking oil from the university dining hall. The campus uses 100,000 gallons of fuel per year. Cooking oil has replaced 20,000 gallons of what would ordinarily be petroleum based fuel. "And we haven't even touched used cooking oil from the restaurants in State College," Cauffman told the group. "We have a lot of fast food in town." Cooking oil and other biodiesel feedstocks -soybean oil, canola oil, beef tallow are some examples - require processing before they can be mixed with petroleum-based diesel in regular engines. Biodiesel mixed with petroleum-based diesel is sold as B20 fuel. B100 fuel has no petroleum at all, and can be run with slight modifications on many diesel engines.

New Holland Agriculture, which has been cooperating with Penn State on the development and use of alternative fuels endorsed B100 for use in its engines in 2007. The company and the university are also conducting joint research on diesel engines that will run on straight vegetable oil, or SVO. SVO for fuel has to be expressed from a source - mostly vegetable oils - but could go straight from a processor to a fuel tank.