Sweet potatoes enter biofuels arena

Southeast Farm Press
Nov 18, 2008 9:43 AM, By Dave Caldwell
North Carolina State University

It’s too early just yet to divine the future of the sweet potato, but a team of College of Agriculture and Life Sciences researchers at North Carolina State University is working on several fronts to make what the scientists call industrial sweet potatoes a viable crop for the state’s growers.

Making a fuel like ethanol from sweet potatoes is a relatively straight-forward process. To begin with, sweet potatoes are a good source of starch. Just process sweet potatoes to turn that starch into sugars, ferment the sugars, and you can make ethanol. The drawback is the cost.

At this point, sweet potatoes are not an economically competitive fuel source. It costs more to grow and process sweet potatoes than many other fuel sources. Indeed, Craig Yencho, associate professor of horticultural science and sweet potato breeder, estimates it costs eight times as much to grow an acre of sweet potatoes as an acre of corn. But Yencho and others are out to change that.

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