Offer HN: Free Use of Agricultural Land 30 miles Northwest of Chicago
I've always had the idea of growing sugarbeet on a conveyor belt. It would take 100-120 days to get from one end to another. You plant a seed with dirt at the start and a sugarbeet rolls off the end after the grow time. You filter out the sugarbeet from the dirt when it falls off (sieve).The conveyor would be fully solar powered and it's power requirements would not be very much due to the slow progression.Once you have the sugarbeet, you turn it in to ethanol, hopefully with another automated process.Economics of sugarbeet to ethanol: http://www.isosugar.org/Egypt/GL2.2.pdf