’I’m living the dream. Most people don’t get to do that.’

That’s Danny Blevins’ view of his life as a retired school teacher, environmentalist and conservationist farmer. And, at 62, he could now be entering into the realm of energy producer.

Blevins’ 100-year-old, 600-acre family farm has become part of a region-wide study to test the growth and energy potential of switchgrass, a native prairie grass that grows across the United States.

Blevins’ five acres of switchgrass was planted in May of this year, the second year of a program guided by Dr. Ray Smith, a forage specialist with the UK College of Agriculture. The $650,000 program is funded by the Agricultural Development Board and tobacco settlement money.

The test program sits well with Blevins’ way of thinking about conservation and the need to look ahead.

In an effort to protect the rich bottomland created by the East Fork River along the county line of Boyd and Lawrence counties, he’s kept to the Jefferson-style methods of crop rotation taught by his late father to reach a goal of growing everything he needs to get his 60 head of cattle ready to sell to local consumers.

’My father taught me about cover crops and rotation when we worked the farm together,’ said Blevins. ’When you constantly break the soil it won’t hold nutrients and it erodes. If we come in here and plant corn over and over we wear out the soil. You can push it only so far.’

The no-till method almost eliminates the need for environmentally harsh and costly fertilizers. The price of fertilizer has more than doubled for this season, as has the price of fuel to both make and spread it.

But the bottomland isn’t where Blevins wanted to plant his test lot of switchgrass. He wanted to find out if the native plant could do well along the ridges and the upland pastures that can’t be used for crop production. It’s what he calls his marginal land, and if the switchgrass will grow there it won’t interfere with the rest of his operation.

The program chose 20 farmers a short driving distance from the East Kentucky Power Cooperative’s Spurlock Station, a coal burning power plant near Maysville. The plant has the right delivery system to allow mixing the switchgrass with coal in normal operations to test energy output and emission levels.

Smith said the program tests the crop as a new energy source.

’The reason we’re doing it on 20 farms is we want to show growers in eastern and northeastern Kentucky how to grow it, how to get it established,’ he said. ’As the market grows, farmers will be able to scale up production.’

On a rare rainy day in late August, Blevins, Smith and a small group of researchers climbed to the upland field through ankle-deep mud to check on the switchgrass. Blevins was worried about damage caused by a fence break that allowed his cattle to get in. Smith and the research team didn’t bat an eye and walked the field inside the new solar-powered electric fence.

Everything would be fine, they determined. They predicted the highly competitive plant would take over the field by late spring and be ready for harvest next November.

The field research by Smith in Kentucky, and others in the Great Plains, is an attempt to build on decades of studies that had shown initial promise with switchgrass. The plant has been increasingly touted as one of the ways to wean the country from foreign oil by converting it to ethanol and a way to help sequester carbon in the ground.

Stopping short of calling switchgrass a ’super plant,’ Smith said the plant comes as a complete package, because it’s very drought resistant, uses little fertilizer and needs only one cut a year.

’One of the big advantages to a crop that is perennial is that it has a deep root system that is going to take carbon dioxide (a greenhouse gas) out of the air, as every plant does to grow,’ Smith said. ’It’s going to store up carbon for the long-term.’

That absorption is better than regularly cultivated crops. Studies from the Agriculture Research Service Northern Great Plains Research Laboratory in Mandan, N.D., show the deep-rooted switchgrass can store seven tons more per acre than wheat or corn. The carbon stays there because the soil doesn’t need to be plowed the following spring to plant a new crop.

But it is the fuel potential that has shown perhaps the most promise. Last year, farmers in Nebraska and North Dakota planted switchgrass in lots of seven to 23 acres for the same purpose as Smith’s 20 Kentucky farmers: To see how it would grow. The goal in the upper Midwest was ethanol conversion and how much energy is needed to make the conversion.

Corn, which started the ethanol conversion business as oil prices climbed, will return 130 percent of the energy that’s put into planting, cultivating and harvesting, Smith said. He said switchgrass will yield 500 percent.

For Blevins the switchgrass holds the added promise of being able to help solve global problems, a major part of his ’living the dream.’ After teaching agriculture at Boyd County High School for nearly 33 years, it’s in his impassioned nature to use the family farm to find long-term solutions.

’Sooner or later we all start looking at the future and looking at what we might do not for our generation,’ he said, ’but for the future generations.’

JOHN FLAVELL can be reached at (606) 326-2659 or jflavell@dailyindependent.com