Rudi Roeslein Plans to Save the Planet with Native Grasses

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Rudi Roeslein, founder of Roeslein Alternative Energy, has a mission to restore 30-million acres of native grass in 30-years.

Rudi Roeslein, founder of Roeslein Alternative Energy, has a mission to restore 30-million acres of native grass in 30-years.

Rudi Roeslein is the epitome of the American Dream. He was 7-years old when his family immigrated from Austria to the United States. His possessions fit in the backpack he was carrying. Today, Roeslein is a very successful businessman who revolutionized the manufacturing of aluminum cans through his processes of modular engineering. He has a wonderful family and enjoys spending a lot of time outdoors with his grandchildren. Now 70, one might expect Roeslein to kick back, relax and retire in comfort, but instead he is just getting started in the pursuit of his next goal – restoring 30-million acres of native grass in 30-years.

Roeslein’s new company, Roeslein Alternative Energy, has three areas of focus: energy production, ecological services and wildlife. Roeslein has found a way to benefit all three with a market-based solution to improve our environment while producing a renewable energy source from animal waste blended with native grasses. Through a process called anaerobic digestion, Roeslein is able to produce a biodiesel from gases immitted from the mixture of manure and native grass. Not only does this process create renewable energy, it eliminates odor and emissions from waste that otherwise would enter our air. Numerous ecological benefits for our landscape and wildlife also occur. The process certainly helps fight climate change.

“If we would plant 100-million acres of cover crops, and 30-million acres of native grasses and forbes on marginal land, we could sequester over 150-million tons of carbon. More importantly, we could produce over 300-million gallons of compressed natural gas (CNG) that would displace the pollution from fossil fuels. If we did this globally, we could reverse the effects of human caused pollution in my lifetime,” Roeslein said.

A concentrated animal feeding operation, referred to as a CAFO, has more than 1,000 animal units. An animal unit is equivalent to 1,000 pounds live weight. The number of animals held in one location is often staggering, with some hog operations holding over 10,000 animals. These animals are kept more than 45 days in the enclosed feed operations. An immense amount of manure is generated from these operations.

CAFOs are controversial to say the least. It seems no one wants one in their backyard, yet most people love bacon and pork chops. There is certainly a dilemma. Fights continue to take place in counties across Missouri over the allowance of CAFOs. Smithfield Hog Production, located in northern Missouri, operates large CAFOs, but they are working hard to find and implement more environmentally friendly practices. To do so, they have partnered with Roeslein Alternative Energy.

Michael Rainwater is the general manager of Smithfield Hog Production. He said, “Smithfield is the largest pork producer in the United States, has a global presence and is really committed to this. We believe there is a right way and a wrong way to do things. Sustainability is not something we talk about. It’s something we do. We have to sustain the environment, because we don’t want to be in business for the next five years, we want to be in business for the next hundred and beyond.”

The concentration of Smithfield’s Missouri facilities is about 600 square miles, and Rainwater says they have about a 1.5-billon dollar impact on the economy. They produced 1.7 million hogs in 2017. They mill about 14,000 tons of feed per week, grinding about 16-million bushels of corn annually. Their operations use between $125,000 and $175,000 worth of energy a month.

All of those hogs produce a lot of manure. In most instances the waste is moved to lagoons where gases are released into the air. The remaining affluent is spread out on land. Smithfield Hog Production spreads 750-million gallons per year. Enter Roeslein Alternative Energy, who mixes native grasses into the manure, spreads tarps over the lagoons, captures the gases, then through anaerobic digestion, refines the gases into biodiesel.

Native grass is key to Roeslein’s mission. In partnership with Smithfield Hog Production and the Environmental Defense Fund, Roeslein recently convened a conference to discuss the future of responsible land management on and around Missouri’s Grand River Basin. A focus was placed on providing market-based solutions that significantly improve water quality, soil erosion, nutrient losses, carbon sequestration, and soil health.

A video Roeslein produced included footage from a helicopter tour of the upper Grand River. It showed heavy erosion produced by row-crop farming on highly erodible land along with nutrient and sediment runoff from farm fields into watersheds. This is an area where Roeslein hopes to establish a 200,000-acre pilot program to address native grasses solving this problem.

“When we look at the Grand River and more of the impaired rivers in north Missouri, they look daunting, but if we take them in incremental steps, I think together we can make significant improvements, we can leave a legacy to our children that is about hope and not a continuous degrading of our landscape,” Roeslein said.

There are four principle practices involved in the project: 1. Convert highly erodible land to native prairie instead of row crops. 2. Institute cover crop programs on agricultural land. 3. Install riparian barriers at riverbanks. 4. Plant contour native grass buffer strips to absorb fertilizer, rainfall and soil runoff.

One very important key to this, is the farmers are not expected to do this only out of the goodness of their heart or solely because of concern for the environment. Roeslein is creating a market-based approach where the grasses will be a crop, bought by the ton.

“When you look at the complexity of agriculture and the complexity of what happens on a landscape, not in my lifetime could I learn everything you need to know to make every right decision. But I don’t want to leave a legacy of another false start or potentially put farmers in a situation where they are going down a pathway that is a dead end,” Roeslein said.

Rudi Roeslein has created a system that benefits both climate change and CAFOs. His plan to restore native grasses, through a market-based approach, will provide all of us cleaner air, healthier soil and purer water.

To learn more about Roeslein Alternative Energy and to watch the video of the Grand River helicopter tour, visit www.roesleinalternativeenergy.com. To listen to an hour-long interview I conducted with Rudi Roeslein, listen to Conservation Federation Podcast episode 15, available on iTunes or at www.confedmo.org/podcasts.

See you down the trail…
Brandon Butler

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