Several practical issues are evident related to land. The vast majority of land in the U. S. that is capable of producing switchgrass is privately owned. Every unit of land is used for some purpose by its current owners. The primary uses range from intensive crop production to recreation and aesthetics. A number of practical issues are likely to be encountered by a business that depends on the establishment of a dedicated energy crop on thousands of hectares owned by hundreds of individuals.

The incentive structure required to entice land owners to enable conversion of millions of hectares from current use to establish switchgrass or some other dedicated energy crop remains to be determined. A high risk would be involved for a biorefinery to depend on spot markets for feedstock. In the absence of spot markets, obtaining a reliable flow of feedstock from a dedicated energy crop such as switchgrass could involve: (1) contracts with individual growers; (2) contracts with a group of growers through a cooperative arrangement; (3) long-term land leases similar to Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) leases; and/or (4) land acquisition. The most cost efficient of these systems remains to be determined. However, land owners have experience engaging in long term (10-15 year) CRP contracts (Osborn et al. 1995). In May of 2012 there were 11,977,326 contracted ha under 737,064 contracts on 408,932 farms (U. S. Department of Agriculture

2012) . The typical contract was for 10 years. These contracts may provide a blueprint for biorefineries that need to ensure a reliable flow of feedstock and for landowners that desire a reliable rent and little risk. Since the U. S. government has several decades of experience of leasing CRP land, writing CRP contracts, and managing CRP acres, one potential contribution of the government might be to use their existing contracting infrastructure to assist private companies with contracting land for switchgrass biomass production (Epplin and Haque 2011).

The CRP provides a U. S. example of how the services of a substantial quantity of land could be acquired and used to produce switchgrass biomass. While thousands of U. S. land owners have experience with long­term land leases as a result of the CRP, some important differences between these leases and a lease to a biorefinery are likely. For instance, the risk of default would be higher with a privately funded biorefinery than with the government, and land owners may require a premium to compensate for this risk (Fewell et al. 2011; Song et al. 2011). Also, a prudent biorefinery management team could be expected to screen potential acres and adjust lease bids based on expected productivity, distance from the proposed biorefinery, and proximity to all-weather roads (Epplin and Haque 2011).