[Stoves] Biomass - food, fuel, fodder, fertilizer .... (Karve, Rajvanshi)

[Traveller]

Moderator: I changed the subject line. This is in continuation of Anil
Rajvanshi's post on hi tech cow dung app and Dr. Karve's observations
about leaf biogas.
-----------
Dear Dr Karve:

I will write separately on the efficiency argument - I agree with Rolf
and in general with the "all emissions, all impacts" thinking - but
permit me to ask you if the TV interview you mention was based on the
work of Deshapnde Foundation.

If not, who?

One of the first "energy" work I did, back in 1980, was a "village
biomass balance" for Russell deLucia, as part of some FAO or USAID or
AsDB work. (I forget; I might rediscover the paper this weekend.)

His paper was about "Food, fuel, fodder, fertilizer..", (we might have
added feedstock, furniture, fence, and cooked up 7F) - alternative
forms and uses of biomass, interconvertibility. We later speculated
about what changes when a "closed, static" system is subjected to an
external stimulus/shock or some internal rearrangement of power,
changes in technologies, etc.

It was a revelation that kept recurring various times over the decades
-- the interconnection of land, water, labor and biomass production,
conversion, use.

All these pundits of sustainability pretend to know the earth. They
are often ignorant about a village.

I dare household energy experts and stove designers to forget
publishing peer-reviewed papers and instead think about the varieties
of villages and cities, of people, of weather, of cuisines.

For people's sake, stop saving carbon. The most valuable carbon -
children's minds - are to be put to more enjoyable use, not saved to
die.

Nikhil



> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Mon, 5 Sep 2016 10:05:12 +0530
> From: Anand Karve <adkarve at gmail.com>
> To: energiesnaturals <energiesnaturals at gmx.de>,    Discussion of biomass
>    cooking stoves <stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org>
> Subject: Re: [Stoves] Hi tech cow dung technology (Anil Rajvanshi)
> Message-ID:
>    <CACPy7SdjZXpBSAtFmZZY2s+hxuEz0fp1q2MdCTsJ9uTg7zWFaA at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>
> Dear Rolf,
>
> when you decide on adopting any technology, you have to consider all the pros and cons, economics and priorities. For a typical Indian farmer, using dung as cooking fuel in the form of biogas is a very costly techbnology. He would need about 40 kg dung every day for producing the necessary amount of gas. Because of higher standard of living of people in the cities, the ritual use of dung cakes and also their price has increased. The dung cakes made from 40 kg dung can be sold for *US$1 *. Spending a dollar every day for cooking the meals is absurd, because the food that the family eats, costs less than that. We are advocating that villagers use biogas plants of our design. 10 kg green leaves yield the same amount of biogas as 40 kg cowdung, and it takes only three days for the leaves to do this, while dung has to remain in the biogas plant for about 40 days.   Dung can be used as an agricultural input. I have been advocating a type of agriculture which uses no fertilizers, because all the minerals required by plants are available in the natural soil. Just yesterday I saw on the t.v. an interview of a proponent of this type of farming.  He claimed that about four million farmers in India followed his advice. All he advocates is to apply to the farmland 25 kg cowdung per ha, once a month. This keeps the number of micro-organisms in soil  high, and it is the microbes which in turn make the soil minerals available to the plants. In my lectures, I advocate the use of 125kg green leaves per ha, once every two months.
>
> Yours
>
> A.D.Karve
>
>
>
> ***
> Dr. A.D. Karve
>
> Chairman, Samuchit Enviro Tech Pvt Ltd (www.samuchit.com)
>
> Trustee & Founder President, Appropriate Rural Technology Institute (ARTI)
>
> On Sun, Sep 4, 2016 at 9:18 PM, energiesnaturals <energiesnaturals at gmx.de>
> wrote:
>
>> Very true Anand, but kcals are not the whole story. Don't forget that biogas burns much more efficiently than dried dung, produces much less noxious smoke and one retains all the fertilizer for growing more. There are many Cs saved!

>> B.R. from Rolf suffering from 42 C in Spain
>>
>> Von Samsung-Tablet gesendet
>>
>> Anand Karve <adkarve at gmail.com> hat geschrieben:
>>
>> Dear Nikhil,
>> producing biogas from dung is a very wasteful process. 1 kg (dry weight)
>> of dung, which would yield 4000 kcal energy if burned,  yields only about
>> 200 kcal energy, if converted into biogas. In the city where I live,
>> cowdung cakes are used in certain religious rites. They are sold at a
>> lucrative price of about 9 USCents per piece. That would be a very
>> attractive business for a Dutch dairy farmer, but drying the dung would be
>> problematic in a country like holland.
>> Yours
>> A.D.Karve
>>
>> ***
>> Dr. A.D. Karve
>>
>> Chairman, Samuchit Enviro Tech Pvt Ltd (www.samuchit.com)
>>
>> Trustee & Founder President, Appropriate Rural Technology Institute (ARTI)