Carbon Friendly Camelina

In the United States, federal mandates to produce more renewable fuels, especially biofuels, have led to a growing debate: Should fuel or food grow on arable land? As we all know, some crops, like corn can be used as feed and as fuel. Russ Gesch, a plant physiologist with the USDA Soil Conservation Research Lab talked with me about another food/fuel crop... Camelina. "Is there the same debate about camellia as there is about corn? For use as a biofuel? Yes. When you talk to people about ethanol they say that by the time you produced ethanol, you've used as much energy to produce it as it will deliver. "There are a couple of debates like that and that is one of them. Of course corn and some of our other commodity crops require large amounts of inputs. Fertilizer, herbicides, pesticides. There is petroleum attached to all of those things. Not just the fuel costs for going in and planting, harvesting them. we have to include the chemicals that help grow them. Camelina, I wouldn't necessarily call it a low input crop but it is much lower than some of our commodity crops like corn in terms of the amount of inputs such as fertilizer and so on. Thus there is less petroleum use attached to that. So from that standpoint it is more economical and from a fuels use standpoint, more carbon friendly you would say."