The North Side's DePaul neigh­borhood is gearing up for another boom. Already the city's hottest residential area for rehab and re­novation, it is now ripe for office redevelopment.

In Michael Pollan’s exploratory work “In Defense of Food” one of his major tenets is to “Don’t eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.”

Since I mentioned the issue of the massive hypoxia, or “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico, I’ve started to dig around into some various solutions to this problem.

In a previous post, I made reference to the “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico where the nutrient runoff from the upper Mississippi river system has introduced millions of tons of leached fertilizers into an area of the gulf roughly the size of Connecticut.

In a previous post I detailed how intensive corn stover utilization for livestock feed replacement and cellulosic ethanol production causes soil degradation through nutrient removal, erosion, runoff and minimizes the soil’s water holding capacity.

The last decade has seen a major increase in collecting and using corn stover for feedstock and increasingly for bio-fuel production, mostly ethanol. Historically, cattle have been allowed to graze corn stover after a harvest with minimal impact to the nutrient levels.