Switchgrass Performance As a Bioenergy Crop in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

With rising energy costs and uncertainty of fossil fuel reserves, it’s important to oversee cheaper, safer, and more renewable forms of bio-energy. As a supplemental alternative energy to coal, bio-energy crops such as switchgrass could play an important role as environmentally safe and economically profitable. In the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, there is plenty of marginal land that can be used as bio-energy crop   fields. The objectives of the study were 1) to identify the best performing switchgrass variety suitable for the Upper Peninsula climatic and soil conditions in Michigan, and 2) the optimum application rate of nitrogen fertilizer as urea or slowly releasing polymer-coated nitrogen fertilizer (also known as ESN) under six different nitrogen rates (0, 30, 60, 90, 120, and 150 kg N/ha/year). Fourteen different varieties of switchgrass (10 upland ecotype and four lowland ecotype varieties) were tested and Cave-in-Rock appears to be the best performing variety for the Upper Peninsula region of Michigan. It appears that there was no significant dry matter yield difference between urea and ESN fertilizer treatments although ESN fertilizer would be a little more costly. Nitrogen application treatments ranging from 30 to 150 kg N/ha/year had significantly higher biomass yield than control treatment (no nitrogen fertilizer). In urea treatment, no significant difference in yield was observed between nitrogen rate treatments except 120 kg N/ha. Like urea treatment, no yield difference was found between ESN fertilizer treatments indicating even 30 kg of ESN was enough to grow switchgrass as compared to 150 kg N/ha under the Central Upper Peninsula soil and climatic conditions.