Cultivating a Crop of Hope

"We can get to a beer, about a 5 percent alcohol solution," Douglas said. "We'd like to be able to get to a wine. We'd like to be able to get to about a 15 percent solution."

Another obstacle, Douglas said, is that the first commercial factory for switchgrass-based ethanol might not arrive for at least five years.

In Virginia, that prospect has left many farmers leery of planting the crop. It can take several years for the stalks to mature, so fields would remain idle while farmers hope for a payoff from a market that doesn't exist.

"I don't have the luxury of having an abundance of land that I can leave out for two or three years until it becomes established," said Bruce Pearce, a farmer who has resisted Wallace's sales pitch.

Now, switchgrass proponents in Virginia are looking for ways around the problems. They tell farmers that, while they wait for the ethanol market to open up, switchgrass can be used like hay, to feed cattle. They're looking for other ways to use switchgrass for fuel, like the factory that will turn it into heating oil.

But for now, switchgrass fields are rare in Virginia. One of the few is in a mountain valley west of Charlottesville, where Taylor Cole -- a former banker who runs a business designed to conserve rural land -- has planted 40 acres. He wants to persuade others to grow the stuff, so they'll be ready when the ethanol market takes off.

One day recently, Cole took a visitor on a Jeep tour of the field. In a scene that featured distant mountains and the Calfpasture River, the overgrown field of switchgrass was the ugliest thing in sight. But not to him.

"I tell you what, you know, beauty is in the eye of the beholder," he said.