What is the most biomass that can be grown on a square meter of ground?

Question

What would this plant be and where best to grow it?

Answer 1

Of course it would be something tall. If you can't grow a tree then elephant grass (Pennisetum purpureum) is probably your best bet. It is native to Africa used as a biofuel crop and animal feed.

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This site has a lot of information about cultivation:

http://www.fao.org/ag/agp/agpc/doc/Gbase...

This is the Wikipedia entry:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennisetum_...

And here's a site describing its use as a biofuel in the UK:

http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory....

Answer 2

Elephant Grass and Switch Grass are the two plants that will produce the highest amount of biomass per acre per year.  They far out produce trees as biomass taking in consideration the number of years required to grow the trees.  Other plants that have a big potential for biomass production are hemp and kanaf.  They can produce more dry matter per acre than the grasses.  Sugarcane also can produce large amounts of biomass and it can be used after the sugar (juice) is squeezed from the plant.  The largest potential for biomass production is algae.  A square meter of water can produce more biomass than any two square meters of land regardless of the plant used.

Answer 3

There are several ways of asking your question.

One is, what is the most biomass that can be grown in a certain shortish time (say a year).  The answer to this is going to be a fast-growing grass, a cereal or other quick-growing bulky crop, or short-rotation coppice.  However, this carbon is not stored, but used for food or fuel.

Another is what's the largest amount of living matter an area can support.  This will be a tall forest, with many large trees -- a tropical rainforest, or perhaps Sequoia forest of western North America.  It grows less per year, but it builds up to a far larger amount of living matter.

However, if you include dead matter too, it will be a peat mire.  Some peat bogs have tens of metres of moss peat beneath the surface, adding up to many tons per square metre.  There is very little living matter, but what there is dies and builds up year by year, in some cases for ten thousand years or more.  One of my own marshy fields has two or three metres of sedge peat, which will be more carbon per square metre than most woodlands (as trees don't grow all that close together).

We need to protect those natural systems which do contain a lot of carbon -- the burning of old-growth forests and letting peat dry out (so it oxidises slowly or burns quickly) is releasing enormous amounts of carbon unnecessarily.

Answer 4

The world record of biomass production was achieved in Puerto Rico using a parcel of Elephant grass.