MEDFORD, Mass.--In this densely populated city outside Boston
without a farm in sight, agriculture researchers are engineering
corn and other crops to become better biofuels. U.S. Secretary
of Agriculture Tom Vilsack last week visited Agrivida, a small
company working on a method it hopes will help deliver on the
biofuels industry's promise of economically making fuel and
chemicals from non-food crops. Vilsack toured the lab of
Agrivida to draw attention to federal investments in renewable
energy research and development. Cheaper biofuels will help
lower fuel costs and provide economic development in rural areas
of the U.S., he said. The company received about $6.8 million in
grants from the USDA and the Department of Energy's ARPA-E
program, in addition to venture capital. Agrivida's is using
genetic engineering and other techniques from the biotech
industry to create proteins with specific traits designed for
rapid, and cheaper, biofuel production from sorghum,
switchgrass, and corn stover, the residual mat