Farming for fuel. U.S. biologists are re-engineering a once-prevalent prairie grass as an energy crop to replace gasoline

Inside a locked greenhouse, prairie grasses rise as tall as a man, some literally propelled out of their gallon buckets on a snarl of roots.

"I’ve never seen a plant like this," said John Vogel, a Stanford-trained molecular biologist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture lab here. "The roots just keep growing and growing and growing."

It’s switchgrass, if not exactly the wild, deep carpet of the American Great Plains that farmers plowed under to make way for the corn and wheat belts. What’s growing in the USDA greenhouse in Albany is federal scientists’ first stab at genetically re-engineering a grass as an energy crop.

By Ian Hoffman, STAFF WRITER

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