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Most ethanol used in motor fuel is distilled from corn, but there is a sweeter solution. The problem has been finding yeasts that will ferment sugars other than glucose into ethanol. Enter Dr. Thomas Jeffries. Jeffries, of the U.S. Forest Products Lab in Madison, has discovered a way to engineer mutant yeast, which will ferment xylose, the most abundant sugar found in nature. This discovery means ethanol could be made from products as common as corn stalks and wood pulp.
Bioconversion of Xylose
Production of Ethanol from Xylose
Ethanol Production from Xylose
Watch this Segment
A viewer wrote to ask In Wisconsin if we could find out why the artwork of Berlin High School students was so superb at the International Crane Foundation's art exhibit. When our crew went to check it out, we found art teacher, Paula Hanson, to be an energizing force for her students. Hanson combines science and art to help her students do their best work. Her technique helps students discover their own unexpected talents.
Berlin High School
International Crane Foundation
Crane Artwork
Click Here to Watch Berlin Crane Art - Real Player 4:23
Click Here to Watch Berlin Crane Art - Windows Media 4:23
The Bois Brule River in Douglas County, commonly called the Brule, is one of the most beautiful rivers in the state. Five U.S. Presidents have visited the Brule, including Calvin Coolidge, who made it the site of his summer White House. For Bill Rogers of Superior, the Brule River has been a second home. His grandmother bought a cabin on the river in 1949 and to this day, the Brule remains an important part of his life. How has this beautiful piece of history stayed so pristine?
In our ongoing series about Land Trusts, producer Joanne Garrett explains how the Brule is protected from development by a series of conservation easements negotiated by a local land trust called The Nature Conservancy. By working together, property owners like Rogers mother, were able to protect a large block of riverfront that preserves their view and provides the public an opportunity to explore one of the state s most pristine rivers.
Gathering Waters Conservancy Information on Land Trusts
Watch Land Trust Bayfield
Gathering Waters Conservancy
Watch Land Trust Brule
Watch Land Trust Chippewa County
West Wisconsin Land Trust
Northeast Wisconsin Land Trust
UW-Green Bay Information on Parfrey's Glen
Trails in Surrounding Area
Wisconsin DNR Information on Parfrey's Glen
Watch Parfrey's Glen-Real 02:25
Wisconsin Public Television
Transcript: In Wisconsin
Original Air Date: January 12th, 2005
Patty Loew:
Hello, and welcome to 'In Wisconsin.' I'm Patty Loew. Each week we bring you stories about the people, places and issues in our state. This week in an age of urban sprawl and rampant development, enjoy the natural beauty of the Brule River along private land in Douglas County. Land that's guaranteed to remain undeveloped forever. Discover why mutant yeast may make for more ethanol in your gas tank. And meet an art teacher who takes her students to new heights at Berlin High School. We'll also take a look at a hidden glen, 'In Wisconsin.'
Here's a trivia question for you. What year did the first commercial test marketing of a fuel that was once called gasohol take place? It happened in Holdredge, Nebraska, where farmers fermented corn to create what's now called ethanol. The year was 1975, and this guy was present that day as a young radio reporter. You know him as ''In Wisconsin'' producer Art Hackett. 30 years later Art's still on the ethanol beat. Last week he brought you a report on fuel blends containing from 10% to 85% ethanol. Today's report has a new twist.
Art Hackett:
The ethanol fuel industry and corn growers are joined at the hip. The letters on the side of this ethanol tank in the Columbia County community of Friesland stand for United Wisconsin Green Producers. Bill Herrmann of Columbus raises over 1,000 acres of corn. He's also vice president of the corporation which owns the ethanol plant.
Bill Herrmann:
It's been working out real good both for me as an investor, I think, and also as a corn farmer for delivering corn up there.
Hackett:
The Friesland ethanol plant buys 15 million bushels of corn a year. Some of it arrives in tractor-drawn wagons, combined minutes before in a field a mile and a half away.
Dan Wegner:
Right now the month of November we've got probably 80% of our corn coming from within 10 to 15 miles.
Herrmann:
Well, the ethanol plant buys from both farmers and elevators, and I think everybody in the area, farmers and elevators alike, are thankful that that plant is there. We're going to use 15 million bushels of corn, which means 15 million bushels of corn would have to be hauled out of state. So that's a big savings.
Wegner:
Most people are realizing at least a 10% increase in their prices.
Hackett:
A bushel?
Wegner:
Per bushel.
Hackett:
Four ethanol plants are already operating in Wisconsin. Two more are under Wisconsin. A seventh plant at a former operation in Jefferson is in the planning stages. It would be three times as big as any of the existing facilities. Demand for ethanol from these plants would increase if a bill pending before the state legislature passes. The bill would mandate all gasoline sold in the state be an ethanol blend. The Department of Natural Resources estimates that currently only about 1/3 of the gas sold contains ethanol.
Hackett:
Even though most ethanol produced today comes from corn, it doesn't have to. In fact, while reporting this story I learned something about that ethanol I saw it being pumped into cars in Nebraska 30 years ago, something that I never knew. It didn't come from corn. It came from paper mill sludge. In fact, if you talk to a researcher here in Madison, he'll tell you the future of ethanol is not in the fields. It's in the forests.
Tom Jeffries:
Yeah, because if this runs too long without having any nutrient in it, the cells get sick. They'll just die. They'll starve.
Hackett:
Dr. Tom Jeffries is talking about yeast cells. The yeast feed on glucose, the same type of sugar found in corn starch. At ethanol plants, yeast turns glucose from corn starch into ethanol, but the yeast in Jeffries' lab are not ordinary yeast cells. They have names. She 21 and She 38.
Jeffries:
But what we've done is we've knocked out one of the respiratory enzymes.
Hackett:
They are genetically engineered mutant yeast designed to crank out more ethanol.
Jeffries:
What that does is by knocking out the capacity for respiration, we force these cells to become far more fermented. They have to grow. In order to grow, they have to use fermentation.
Hackett:
And the mutant yeasts are special in another way, they don't just ferment glucose.
Jeffries:
They ferment Xylose. They ferment Xylose to ethanol.
Hackett:
Xylose is a different kind of sugar. It's not only found in the corn kernels that are fed into ethanol planlts. Xylose is also found in corn stover, the stalks, husks, and cobs spewed out the back of the combine and left to compost on the ground.
Jeffries:
And Xylose is the second-most abundant carbohydrate in nature. It's found just about everywhere you look. You go for a walk in the woods, and Xylose makes up about 20% to 25% of everything you see. And if you look out on a corn field, Xylose makes up about 25% of all the corn stover. And so what we're trying to do is we're trying to develop technologies that will enable us to convert the Xylose that's in corn stover and wheat straw and soy residues and in hardwood residues into ethanol.
Hackett:
Tom Jeffries is looking for uses for waste from the forest products' industry. After all, he works for the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Forest Products Laboratory. It could be trees too small to turn into lumber or paper mill sludge, the brown broth in this beaker is from the waste water of a fiberboard plant. Jeffries is fermenting wood residues currently going unused to see if they can be used as sources of ethanol for your fuel tank.
Jeffries:
In many parts of this country we have such abundant wood residues that we don't know what to do with them. This is a big problem. This is one of the reasons this research is being conducted here at the Forest Products Lab is because every year, every summer our country is ravaged with forest fires because of overstocked stands, because of small diameter timber that, in fact, is so abundant that there is not enough water to sustain its growth. And so what we would like to be able to do is to use some of those small diameter trees, trees that are currently overstocked in regions where it is very arid and use those for renewable fuels, and our technology will contribute to that.
Hackett:
While today s ethanol economy can function on corn grains, the future may be in ethanol from other sources. The ethanol industry is ramping up the marketing of an almost pure ethanol fuel, E-85. 85% ethanol. Only 15% gasoline. Jeffries says its production will bump up against the supply of corn.
Can we run the United States on E-85 only using
Jeffries:
No. No way. No. The demand is far too great.
Hackett:
Jeffries and his colleagues recently licensed the mutant yeasts with two plants in Iowa. Within three years they could be making ethanol not just with corn kernels, but corn stover as well.
Jeffries:
Eventually they want to use this organism or another organism that we are working on now to produce ethanol commercially from corn stover.
Hackett:
Assuming corn farmers want to part with the residue, Bill Herrmann in Columbia County said he wouldn't be interested.
Herrmann:
Most of our land is a clay land. So the corn stalks you see out here add to the organic soils. So I would not be interested in selling corn stalks unless they were off of some really high, low, organic land, or else we'd be depleting our soil and have to buy commercial fertilizer to increase the nutrients in the soil.
Hackett:
Farmers elsewhere with better soils might feel differently. There's always all of that wood waste.
Jeffries:
It's abundant. Every year we make many, many, many times more biomass than we use in our entire energy economy. But we can't begin to tap into that for fuels until we solve the problem of Xylose fermentation, because it's so abundant we can't afford to throw it away. We have to use it.
Loew:
Ethanol fuel isn't without controversy. While proponents tout it as a renewable fuel, there's debate about air pollution levels from both the manufacture and use of ethanol. Still, the state legislature is considering mandating that at least 10% ethanol be included in all regular grade gasoline sold in Wisconsin. Also, Chevron and General Motors have announced a joint effort to create a network of fueling stations in California that sell an 85% ethanol fuel blend called E-85. Ethanol producers are considering opening more E-85 stations here in Wisconsin.
We often invite viewers to tell us about interesting people or stories happening in the state. Tonight we're bringing you a story that took shape from one of those tips. Kathy Dickerson from Sun Prairie emailed us about a children's art exhibit at the International Crane Foundation in Baraboo. Kathy said that of the hundreds of pictures in the exhibit, the crane images created by students at Berlin High School stood out. This concept caught reporter Frederica Freyberg's eye. She went to Berlin to find out what made this artwork so special.
Frederica Freyberg:
The whooping crane, a majestic animal. The tallest flying bird in North America. Pollution and development nearly wiped the whooping crane out of existence by the 1950's, but they are slowly coming back. They now number about 400 worldwide. That's thanks to efforts like those of the International Crane Foundation near Baraboo.
Paula Hanson:
I want these students to become passionate.
Freyberg:
It's also thanks to a different kind of effort on the part of high school art teacher, Paula Hanson.
Hanson:
I want them to know that they are the messenger, that they are the ones who are sending a message out to the world that we need to protect our environment so that we can protect the species.
Freyberg:
Busy hallways at Berlin High don't seem to lend themselves to the serious business of artistic expression with an ecological bent. But enter Mrs. Hanson's room. She's talking about extinction and preservation.
Hanson:
What we're going to start with is our time lines of the whooping crane versus the sand hill crane.
Freyberg:
Paula Hanson is licensed to teach art.
Hanson:
So that you create form, you create depth; you create the illusion of the textures that you're trying to achieve.
Freyberg:
But while teaching art, Paula Hanson also teaches science.
Hanson:
Make sure that you create a habitat that makes ecological and biological sense to that bird that you're working on.
Carley Horvath:
Mrs. Hanson is an awesome teacher.
Freyberg:
Carley Horvath is one of the students inspired to do her best work in Mrs. Hanson's class, work like this piece entitled ''Sunset Crane.'' It's among the works that are part of an International Traveling Exhibit, an art exchange program through the international crane association.
Alyssa Rod:
We have people going to China, Russia, India, Cuba; those countries are where we're going to be sending those pieces of artwork to when they can go.
Freyberg:
Carley says she has never left the Midwest, but her artwork will.
Horvath:
And just thinking that other people in like Japan or wherever it will go will see it, is just amazing.
Hanson:
So you're actually creating the illusion of these moving wings.
Girl:
Okay.
Hanson:
And that's why it looks kind of blurry.
Freyberg:
Mrs. Hanson wants the artwork of cranes sketched on paper to look scientifically realistic. The message is not abstract, but believable in its beauty.
Juan De Hoyos:
I used chalk pastel. I really like it because they're really bold colors, and if you make a mistake, it's pretty easy to fix it, so-- and I make a lot of mistakes.
Freyberg:
You'd never know it from Juan De Hoyos Art Exchange Exhibit. He's back in Mrs. Hanson s class for another year working on another crane for the next exhibit.
Erica Grota:
It just kind of looks free and at peace in the wilderness.
Freyberg:
Erica Grota says she's happy her artwork will make a world tour, but she's also pleased people closer to home got a look.
Grota:
It's just really neat to know that people actually noticed.
Freyberg:
But the integration of art and science doesn't explain the whole reason Mrs. Hanson's students create works that stand out as exceptional.
Hanson:
I just feel that kids don't always know what they're capable of. They don't know sometimes what their potential is, and as a teacher, you have to push them to their limit, and what truly thrills me is when I see a student that looks at their finished work and goes, wow! I did that.
Freyberg:
Paula Hanson says her students are helping tell the world about this beautiful, incredible bird, showing the world what would be lost without them. But she's not just focused on the world audience. She's looking to impassion her students one canvas at a time.
Hanson:
These students now are talking about, Mrs. Hanson, I saw a sand hill crane in the field and it had two little ones running around, and now every time I see a crane I think about what we did in art class, and I'm thinking wonderful. It's working.
Loew:
The International Crane Foundation tells us any school or child can participate in its Art Exchange Program. For more information check out the link on our Web site at wpt.org/inwisconsin.
Helping to educate people about endangered species like the whooping crane can pay off with very tangible rewards. Working to help preserve animal habitat is also rewarding, especially for people who own land. In our next story we meet one of those property owners. Bill Rogers inherited wild and scenic land on the Brule River, land he fell in love with while visiting as a child. Rogers had no choice but to keep the land exactly as he inherited it, and that's fine with him. Producer Joanne Garrett finds out why in our ongoing series on land trusts.
Bill Rogers:
My grandmother bought our place in 1949. I spent every summer of my life up here growing up. I was here from the first week of June until Labor Day weekend. It's so much a part of me. My blood flows like the river does.
Joanne Garrett:
The river is the Brule in Douglas County, commonly called the Brule. It starts near Solon Springs and flows north into Lake Superior. The canoeist and landowner is Bill Rogers of Superior, a third generation Brule River fan who summers here as much as he can.
Rogers:
It's just a real treasure.
Garrett:
The beauty and the bounty of the Brule have drawn people in for over a century.
Rogers:
We've had five presidents that have been on the river; the most notable one was Calvin Coolidge in 1928. They can go anywhere in the world. Why did they end up here on the Brule River? It was something about this river and the feeling that brought these people here. I don't know if there are very many rivers that you can say that five presidents have spent time on. It s pretty special.
Garrett:
It's special in large measure because of what surrounds it. The river is a rarity in the state.
Rogers:
In this particular stretch of the river, because it was privately owned at the turn of the century, was spared the logger's ax. Everything else surrounding this section of the river was cut, and when they cut, they cut everything. They cut up millions of lumber, and then they left, and fortunately this section was spared. These beautiful old white pines and Norways are the last remnants.
Garrett:
Tourists came and stayed and built beautiful lodges and boathouses.
Rogers:
The windows are still the same. You know, the masonry fireplace, the screen porch; the log exterior hasn't changed at all. This particular lodge that we're going by now must be in the fourth generation, fifth generation, and that lodge hasn't changed. Flowers change every year. The lodge hasn't changed.
Garrett:
It's an unparallel view of natural beauty and historic charm, and back in the 1980's it was a view in peril. Development threatened. In response, a group of Brule River landowners, including Rogers' mother, worked with their local land trust, the Nature Conservancy. Together they each got a conservation easement on their Brule River property. What's a conservation easement? Vicki Elkin, the director of Gathering Waters, a statewide consortium of land trusts explains.
Vicki Elkin:
A conservation easement is a legal agreement, it's a binding, legal agreement that a landowner enters into voluntarily with a land trust, or it can be a government agency, and then it runs with the land. It's attached to the deed, so all future landowners know that this conservation easement is attached to the land.
Garrett:
The goal is to protect the land, but the exact terms of the easement can vary widely. In the case of the Brule River property owners, for example, some easements allow for the taking of firewood, some don't. The one that Bill Rogers' mom signed was fairly conservative.
Rogers:
She signed a contract that stated that she had to maintain the property as it is, that she could not add anything. She couldn't put anymore structures up. She couldn't take any wood off. She had to preserve this property just the way it was the day she signed it.
Garrett:
The overarching goal of the easements was to protect this view up and down the river, the view of the river from the river.
Rogers:
It protects the view from the sense that I can't open up the property to give myself a better view. So I'm restricted. I can't do anything about it. Dead trees fall into the river, we're supposed to leave them there because it provides habitat for the trout. So I'm restricted as to what I can do and can't do, and I think that's great. If you go to any of the lakes in the area and you see where people from an urban area have come up, bought some property, and they'll make a lawn right down to the water frontage. I mean, they'll turn it into this manicured lawn, which does nothing for any kind of wildlife. And this protects it. This tries to keep the setting the way it was and the way it will always be.
Garrett:
The result? You're looking at it. Nearly 90% of the privately held property on the upper Brule, nearly 5,000 acres, is protected by conservation easements. The rest is in state forest. The result is available to anyone with a canoe.
Rogers:
Views like this, most people don't get a chance to experience. They're seeing something that hasn't changed since the turn of the century. I mean, these trees, these beautiful trees, where can you go to see this? Even though this is private property, we're sharing it with them because they have access to the river, and they have a right to it. So it's a wonderful experience for them to see what an easement can do and what the property owners are trying to do.
Garrett:
What an easement can do. Easements vary. In some cases a landowner can receive payment for their conservation easement from a land trust or a government agency. In the case of the Brule River property owners, they donated their easements.
Elkin:
Most landowners are motivated by a love for their land. That's why they do these deals, but they also receive tax benefits if they donate these easements. So they receive income tax deductions. The value of the easement is taken off their estate. And also they receive some property tax relief for doing the easement.
Garrett:
But perhaps the most important relief that easements offer is of a different kind.
Rogers:
That's a nice fish. It's the future generations, and as a family gets bigger, you'll have some siblings that maybe don't have the same relationship with the river. Maybe they're in a dash for cash and they need some money. So then you start selling off pieces, or you start adding more houses to it, and it changes. You can go to bed at night and know that, you know, the next generation is going to get up in the morning and see the same thing you do. They'll see the light coming through, they're going to hear the wind, they're going to see the herons out here and it's not going to get bigger or busier. It's just a time that's not going to change.
Loew:
Next week we'll continue our land trust series with a look at how a landowner can allow for a combination of everything from commercial development to natural preservation on the same tract of land. That's our program for this week. Join us on Monday at 7:00 p.m. for Wisconsin Public Television's coverage of the Martin Luther King Day Celebration at the State Capitol. Then on Tuesday we'll bring you live coverage of the governor's State of the State Address. That's also at 7:00 p.m. We say goodbye tonight after a winter walk at Parfrey's Glen in Sauk County. For In Wisconsin, I'm Patty Loew. See you next time.
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