Talk:Buffalo Commons

Ethanol Corn

How would the Ethanol Corn boom efect the procpects of this proposal--J intela 03:13, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

the two main issues are this. the portion of the great plains they are talking about here is basically a desert, and corn is basically not a desert plant. the anasazi grew corn in the desert, but they heavily irrigated it. and they also went extinct eventually, some people believe because even their great irrigation systems couldn't handle the droughts they faced in around 1000 AD. corn needs a lot of water, and deserts dont have water.

corn is an intensive crop and takes a lot of nutrients out of the soil compared to, say, grass. so they'd need to truck in a lot of fertilizer to grow corn in the areas of plains we are talking about.

corn also has shallow roots (ie a few inches vs several feet for some plains grasses). this alters the way the water is transported through the layers of subsoil (ie, the deep roots transport water/nutrients up and down the layers of soil). also it affects the way the structure of the subsoil is held together (ie, soil erodes easier with shallower roots... also soil erodes differently if it has different moisture content, and lack of deep grass roots would probably alter this too). sooooo uhm yeah. you might even need to do some kind of soil modification to keep it from blowing away if you grew 'only corn' there.

if the price of ethanol reached a certain level, then landowners could decide it would be profitable to grow corn in the great plains and sell it to burn in cars. the problem is that even farmers in places that grow corn naturally well, like iowa, are going broke on some of the ethanol mills they built... so unless gasoline just goes sky high in prices, i dont see how it would be profitable to grow corn all over the great plains.

a different 'boom' would be a 'cellulosic ethanol' that was derived from non-corn plants, like switchgrass or something. if you could find a grass crop that would grow in the great plains desert-type conditions, and easily (cheaply) be converted to ethanol, then you are looking at the overnight destruction of any buffalo playground as speculators would buy up all the land in a few months. these are only my opinions though! i have no expertise and have done no research. its just me spouting off. Decora (talk) 17:57, 23 February 2010 (UTC)

Very odd

Very odd that this article does not include a map of the proposed area. Could it be that the author knows that everyone inside the dotted line would raise a stink? 68.0.119.139 (talk) 10:45, 27 October 2008 (UTC)

Also, why the note that "The proposal would affect ten Western U.S. states." without naming which states those are? --TALlama (talk) 23:05, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

uhh bias anyone

there are a large number of ranchers dont want to sell their land for some public buffalo herd to run through... fences are incredibly important to ranchers. would be nice to dig up some articles on their perspective on the whole think. Decora (talk) 18:01, 23 February 2010 (UTC)

Support your bias with references and quotes, and edit it in.--Wetman (talk) 21:53, 23 February 2010 (UTC)

Effect of Fracking

Since Commons proposal, intense fracking has had a MAJOR effect on economy of, in particular, the Dakotas, Utah, etc.; so what has this 'recent' development had on the proposal? 66.81.253.219 (talk) 02:20, 26 October 2015 (UTC)

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