The economics of growing shrub willow as a bioenergy buffer on agricultural fields: A case study in the Midwest Corn Belt: Shrub Willow Economics

Landscape design has been embraced as a promising approach to holistically balance multiple goals related to environmental and resource management processes to meet future provisioning and regulating ecosystem services needs. In the agricultural context, growing bioenergy crops in specific landscape positions instead of dedicated fields has the potential to improve their sustainability, provide ecosystem services, and minimize competition with other land uses. However, growing bioenergy crops in sub-productive or environmentally vulnerable parts of a field implies more complex logistics as small amounts of biomass are generated in a distributed way across the landscape. We present a novel assessment of the differences in production and logistic costs between business as usual (BAU, dedicated fields), and distributed landscape production of shrub, or short-rotation willow for bioenergy within a US Midwestern landscape. Our findings show that regardless of the mode of cropping, BAU or landscape design, growing shrub willows is unlikely to provide positive revenues (−$67 to –$303 ha−1 yr−1 at a biomass price of $46.30 Mgwet−1) because of high land rental costs in this agricultural region. However, when translated into a practice cost per unit of N removed at the watershed scale (range: $1.8–37.0 kg N−1 yr−1), the net costs are comparable to other conservation practices. The projected opportunity cost of growing willows instead of corn on underproductive areas varied between –$14 and $49 Mgwet−1. This highlights the potential for willows to be a cost effective choice depending on the intra-field grain productivity, biomass price and desirable concurrent ecosystem services. © 2016 The Authors. Biofuels, Bioproducts and Biorefining published by Society of Chemical Industry and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.