It strongly believes in only putting deforested land where better options are not always available, under palm plantings. This is often the case in many developing countries where the deforestation, slash and burn and abandonment of land after serial cropping or otherwise has led to rapid decrease in tree cover and poor soil quality as the soil has lost most nutrients and is being heavily eroded. In many of these cases, farming would require heavy doses of chemical fertilizers or slow, long addition of composting/organic material, which is not always available with the right balances and can be very costly. The next best option is to carry out polyculture and try to develop food forests. One of these routes is mid to large scale palm plantations.
Palm including babassu and other varieties depending on locales takes a few years to establish and can be a capital intensive exercise but once established, the plantation can provide an ongoing supply of feedstock for edible oil and fuel purposes.
g+c- is working with partners to establish a few palm crushing plants for crude palm oil extraction and utilize the wastes, biomass etc for local fuel use, in the plant and also recycle as soil enhancers and composting material for the otherwise degraded soil in the vicinity.
The objective is to supply crude palm oil to regional palm oil refineries for food grade palm oil production and also to biodiesel plants as alternative feedstock.
g+c- strongly believes that regional biodiesel plants and even small scale distributed biodiesel plants should be able to handle multiple feedstocks and rely mostly on non-edible slate of feedstocks.
In the absence of scalable development of algae or other feedstocks for biodiesel, g+c- believes that alternative feedstocks especially non-edible ones will be in demand for the forseeable future. When the price of petroleum goes back over $100/barrel, the demand for alternative feed stocks will rapidly increase.
