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Corn Burners
Tue Jul 22, 2003
Listen in RealAudio 
Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton for the Weather Notebook's special series on global climate
change.
More and more Americans are looking to alternative, renewable fuels to cut down on the
emissions from fossil fuels which may be warming the planet. In the farm state of South
Dakota, some people are combining the home-heating ways of the pioneers with new technology.
Correspondent Curt Nickisch has the story.
Pioneers on the Great Plains used iron stoves to burn cow manure, corncobs and wood chips to
warm their homes. Eventually propane and natural gas won out for their ease of use. But highly
efficient wood burning stoves have now been adapted to burn something that's plentiful in this
farm state: corn.
Farmer Kevin Pravecek dumps the hard, yellow kernels into his stove. Corn is in such good
supply, it's relatively cheap.
KP: Since I raise corn and it's not worth nothing, I figured just as well burn it.
Corn heats as well as most types of wood, and Pravecek's stove is more efficient than his oil
furnace.
It makes sense to other farmers, too. Mike Dowling says, unlike fossil fuels, he can always
grow more when he runs out.
MD: I don't feel as guilty leaving the door open with the corn burner as I would with the
natural gas, because I'm not wasting a natural resource. I personally cannot replace that.
However corn I can replace quite easily.
And the stoves have another advantage over fuels that produce greenhouse gases: corn burns so
cleanly (less than a gram of emissions per hour) that the Environmental Protection Agency
doesn't even require manufacturers to analyze the emissions. Meanwhile, farmers here are
finding that by burning the kernels they grow, it's saving them a bushel.
In Sioux Falls, this is Curt Nickisch.
The Weather Notebook is a production of the Mount Washington Observatory. Our series on global
climate change is supported by the Roy A. Hunt Foundation and the New England Science Center
Collaborative.
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