The Big Deals in Biofuels

Universities, especially land-grant institutions in the Midwest, help lead the race to harvest energy from crops

On an overcast, chilly day in late March, scraggly rows of experimental crops line the test plots here at Iowa State University's research farm. Corn is king in Iowa, both as a food grain and now as a focus of efforts to rev up the biofuel industry. But these plants bear less familiar names: switch grass, Miscanthus, and kenaf.

The brown and black stalks are not much

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