Corn's gotten a bad rap lately, due to its ethanol-driven rising prices that have inflated costs of farm land, livestock feed and even tortillas.

So researchers are ready to switch to grasses like switchgrass as a possible source of ethanol. It requires less irrigation and fertilizer than corn, successfully filters out pollutants that run off from farm fields, and holds up well in droughts.

The only problem is that scientists haven't perfected how to extract the grass's sugars, which are chemically locked up and harder to extract than those in corn, in order to obtain the right concentrations of alcohol needed to turn it into ethanol. Until that becomes feasible, the grass can be used like hay to feed cattle, and the University of Maryland has turned it into heating oil and uses it to heat a maintenance building and a greenhouse.

EthosGen, a Dallas-based enterprise, patented a method for deriving ethanol from grasses and is searching for a location to test that process on a large scale. The process combines enzymes with a genetically-engineered grass strain to develop ethanol.

Cornell University is also experimenting with grasses in a state where 90 percent of New York's energy needs are met by imported oil and natural gas. Governor Eliot Spitzer's new energy initiative calls for the state to get 25 percent of its energy needs from renewable resources by 2013. If grasses can successfully and economically be turned into ethanol, it would be a major push toward that goal.

Perhaps the wave of the future will be weed-like, golden and billowing in the wind.