Hi Patrick (and all),,
In my job here at Ohio State, I am Information Coordinator
for the Sustainable Agriculture program. I do research on
obscure questions such as this.
>I am an agricultural economist investigating the potential
>of different biomass feedstocks for non-food uses (biofuels,
>papermaking, etc). At the moment, I am particularly interested
>by the clothing industry (could use flax, hemp, etc.). My work
As luck would have it, I have done research on both hemp and
another 'alternative paper' crop called kenaf. The hemp
documents are in electronic medium. If you are interested in
these, let me know and I'll send them your way. Make sure your
mail box is empty, though, because they are quite large. The
information that I have on kenaf, however, is only in hardcopy
format. If you send me your snail mail address in a private
e-mail message, I'll send them to you.
>focuses on crops that could be grown on the North-East of North
>America, but it would be interesting to compare the economics of
>these alternative crops to the #1 fibre crop: cotton. Would any of
>you know what it costs to grow cotton in the US ? What about
>governmet susidies ? Is there any ? Any contact persons you could suge
>suggest ? Thank you for help !
I also did some research on cotton a couple of months ago. One source
that I found very useful, was the Cotton andWool yearbook. This is
online via gopher at:
gopher oldal.mannlib.cornell.edu
Once connected to their gopher server, choose #1 (datasets), #3 (crops),
and then (I think) 1 again. There is a lot of tables (lotus format)
here and I think you could probably find wh
Tim Barkley
Information Coordinator
Ohio State University Extension
(614) 732-2381
barkleyt@agvax2.ag.ohio-state.edu (work)
tbarkley@muskingum.edu (surf's up)
TAG-> Off the modem..through the phoneline..'nuthin but net!