Plantation-grown willow and poplar crops may be the future feedstock for 'green' power generation in the North.
Regional field trials are underway to determine whether marginal farmland can be brought back into production to grow fast-growing plantation trees for co-generation plants and possible bio-energy projects. 
A partnership of government researchers, farmers and private business have two test plantations on private properties in Sault Ste. Marie and Hearst under cultivation. Two more are planned for sites in northwestern and northeastern Ontario.
Natural Resources Canada is providing the science direction for the $850,000 project. Forestry giant Tembec has signed on as a partner along with two Hearst companies; La Maison Verte, a tree nursery, and Villeneuve Construction, which hosts one of the plantations.
Willow and poplar are a naturally fast-growing species. Once the plantation is harvested, the trees coppice -- or grow back -- and can be re-harvested for 20 years with as many as seven crop rotations before replanting is required.
"Within two and half years we think we can harvest them for bio-energy purposes," says Margo Shaw, director of the Upper Lakes Environmental Network.
Her Sault-based research facilitation group helped secure more than $200,000 in provincial funding for the project. The group is also waiting on additional funding from the federal government.
Each two-hectare site will hold up to seven strains of willow and poplar.
"The idea is to see which strains grow best under (various) soil and climate conditions," says Shaw.
If the plants adapt and grow well and there's a good business case to made, it may hold great potential as an alternative agricultural crop for underutilized farm land.
"We need to answer some of the basic questions whether this is a suitable crop for the North and then we can start thinking broader than that," says Steve Dominy, chief of programs & planning at the Great Lakes Forestry Centre in Sault Ste. Marie.
Skyrocketing energy prices in Ontario has contributed to the decimation of the North's forest industry. It's caused many producers to start building co-generation plants to burn wood waste for power and heating.
And the industry crisis has spurred mill towns like Hearst to investigate new ways of using wood to process into renewable bio-fuels and energy.
Studying willow for development as a future energy source has been underway in the U.S. for years.
Known in research circles as short rotation intensive culture regime, researchers at the State University of New York (SUNY) have been involved in willow biomass production since the mid 1980s.
In Upstate New York, willow is thought to have great potential in the eastern U.S. Wood biomass is in many ways a renewable feedstock that can be converted into wood chip or pellet fuel, ethanol and syngas.
The New York study says 75 jobs can be created for each 4,000 hectares planted.
Shaw says the research phase involves training five jobs per site, but the real potential is the possibility of putting an estimated 200,000 hectares of marginal farm land in Northern Ontario back into use.
Future plantation sites being considered are mostly idled, but "fairly fertile" and stump-free farmland that holds moisture.
"We want an open field that's not in frost pocket and is close to a community that's ideal to draw on local labour," says Dominy.
So far, Dominy says the sites selected seem to grow trees very well and farmers see that as an interesting option.
Among their early findings are the plantations need extensive weeding to encourage the best growth. "It's closer to an agricultural crop, than a forestry crop," says Dominy.
Because test sites are limited in size, the plants are packed together with 15,000 stems per hectare, about six times the number of trees grown for lumber in a conventional plantation.
When harvested after two and half growing seasons, the trees will be four inches in diametre, depending on the site and climatic conditions.
A project economics team is monitoring the costs of plantation management along with the business and logistics case of whether to process trees on-site into a value-added fuel or wood product, or truck it to an eventual end-user for their specified use.
Because of trucking costs, locating a plantation as close to a mill or bio-refinery is a necessity. Early estimates vary between 50 and 100 kilometres as a maximum hauling distance. In the Hearst area, there's a co-generation plant in nearby Calstock, about 30 kilometres west of town.
"But (cost determination) will depend upon the product and the volume you're able to bring out," says Dominy.
