Building On Oilseed

Building on Oilseed. I’m Greg Martin as Line On Agriculture presents the Harvest Clean Energy Report.

During this year’s Harvesting Clean Energy Conference a lot of people were on hand to discuss various projects and products including Donn Randall, Crop & Forage Program Manager for the Wyoming Business Council who works to develop programs in Wyoming.

RANDALL: One of those value added programs is the development of oilseed crops as diversified crops in Wyoming. I attended the Harvesting Clean Energy Conference last year in Billings for the first time and I had the opportunity to bring some Wyoming producers out to University of Idaho, southeast Washington, northeast Oregon and Montana State which those states are much further ahead in oilseed production and research than Wyoming.

Randall saw the potential in the oilseed business and he took advantage of some research grant money.

RANDALL: The Western SARE is housed out of Utah State University. It stands for sustainable agriculture research and education and when I interviewed for the position they asked what would you see as a potential value added program that you’d like to promote, beginning of ’08 fuel prices – everything related to crude oil was out of the world and so I told them we need to step up and get into the oilseed development and at that time.

He says it has taken some trial and error working with the crops but bottom line is that they do well in the Wyoming area but he says…

RANDALL: One of the biggest obstacles I’ve found is that I can convince our Wyoming producers that it’ll work well in their rotation and a crop that we’ve had a lot of success with is camelina but the biggest problem is markets. Producers are not going to produce anything if there is not a viable market. And in the year’s time since we’ve received the grant and we’ve got a Wyoming oilseed working group, we’ve made some big inroads into markets.

They are finding that the oilseed crops do well and he says they are experimenting with ways to produce two crops on one patch of ground.

RANDALL: Some of our producers that were on our oilseed trade mission and actually planted some canola – winter canola in with an alfalfa. What our thoughts were if you could plant it early in late summer and get a good root base on that canola and then harvest as an oilseed crop as a command crop, get it off and then have your hay because we have such a high volume of hay production.

For additional information on clean energy, visit harvestcleanenergy.org. That’s today’s Line On Agriculture. I’m Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.

www.harvestcleanenergy.org