Time for the planting oilseed question. Anyone planting any oilseed crops this year for fun or profit?
We have some winter canola flowering and will plant soybeans this year.

A little plot of camelina.

We do burn home grown fuel to produce the oilseed crop. Dino diesel is used for winter blending and in one corn harvesting machine.

Although dinosaurs are getting more difficult to source, they can be found.

ROFLMAO!

You are one of the funniest members on this forum..

quote:

Originally posted by fuelfarmer:
A little plot of camelina.

Glad to see you got some camelina in the ground!

Regards to you and yours,

Bob in Moncure

quote:

We do burn home grown fuel to produce the oilseed crop.

What percent of your homegrown fuel is used to cultivate and harvest the oilseed crop?

quote:

What percent of your homegrown fuel is used to cultivate and harvest the oilseed crop?

I really do not know or even have a good guess. We also use the fuel for a lot of different jobs not directly related to oilseed crop production.

OK, so what percent of the VO that you grow do you use yourself, and how many acres do you devote to fuel production? What I'm trying to get at is what percent of the productive land is used to grow what percent of fuel for the operation? For example if you are now cultivating 10% of the land for fuel crop and your fuel consumption has been reduced by 40% compared with when you were totally using petro-diesel.

Hi John,

I work on the same farm operation as fuelfarmer. As he said, there are many variables that make accurate numbers hard to get, but I'll try to put down a few to give an idea.


The total fuel usage of the operation I would guess to be around 15,000 gal/yr (off road fuel) give or take 2000 depending on the year. Probably more than half of that volume is used in dairy, poultry or custom operating equipment that's not even related to our own crop raising.

Our total acreage of crops per year is somewhere around 550 acres, with about 350 acres of corn, 80-100 of beans, 100-200 acres of barley, 70-80 of canola, and 50+ acres of alfalfa & hay. Another factor to consider is that some of these are double cropped, so it's sometimes possible to harvest the 80 acres of beans and canola off the same fields in one year. Our barley and canola are harvested in the early summer, followed by a crop of corn or soybeans to take off in the fall.

So using modest numbers, we'll figure on getting 3500 bu. of beans off of 80 acres, and 3500 bu. of canola from the same acreage, the beans should make at least 2600 gal of fuel and the canola 5200 gal., so that should easily be enough to cover the fuel needs of raising our crop acres. In reality, we haven't realized those numbers yet since half of our first large canola crop left the farm to be processed in another plant.

While the soybeans and canola produce a significant amount of fuel, we don't consider those acres as "devoted" to fuel, since their primary function is still providing nutritious feed for our cattle. The "byproduct" of fuel is just icing on the cake.

Every home should have a big farm.

Dear Sir,

It sounds like you know your local crop yields and are poised to enter into both the edible and biodiesel industries. I am curious if you are planning on building your own oil refining facility. And if so whether you plan on producing edible oil and biodiesel, or just one or the other.

I am a process chemist that specializes in biodiesel, and to a lesser extent edible oils.

Please contact me directly if you would like to discuss things further.


Take Care,

Kristof Reiter

Reiter Scientific

Thank you, those are exactly the sort of data I was asking about. It appears that approximately 14% of the crop area can produce approximately 52% of the fuel for your mixed farm operation and all of the crop producing fuel required. Would you classify your farm as a large, medium, or small operation relative to other farms in your region?

Have you joined your local Farmer's Coop? Maybe start one yourself as a way to get other farmers involved...

I'd rate our farm as medium/large for this area, but still all family operated.

quote:

Originally posted by clean and green:
Have you joined your local Farmer's Coop? Maybe start one yourself as a way to get other farmers involved...

A local farmer, and forum member, is working on a project that will get other farmers crops involved.

http://www.lancasterfarming.com/node/1824

The little plot of camelina is doing well.

From what I read on wikipedia, camelina is a relative of canola (rapeseed). Does this mean that the seeds are going to be super tiny like canola, and therefore requiring a different kind of oil press?

Another conflict I see is that the oil is very high (45%) in omega-3 oils. It is possibly worth $5-6 per gallon, 8-10 if cold-pressed. Better off selling it to a company such as Martek Biosciences that produces omega-3 oils from algae oil. Their oil is worth more as a baby food additive (they provide all of the DHA for the baby formula companies in the U.S.), about $60-100 per gallon, than as biodiesel feedstock.

Oilseeds like other farm grown commodities are worth a lot more if they can be processed. I have heard of more than one operation that buys a press to make fuel only to discover that the oil is worth a lot more than fuel. Why take oil worth 5 dollars,add another dollar in processing cost and sell it for $2.25.
Making food grade oil is something we are not set up to do at this time.

Yes the seeds are very small, but they should work fine in the press.

We have over 100 acres of Safflower in the ground. Our third year planting it. We average about 120-150 gallons a acre. We also have 35 acres of camelina in the ground. We built a custom food grade processing facility and plan on selling ALL of our safflower as food oil. 40-60% will go to bottles for home cooking, and skin care products. The other 40% is headed for the fryer, under one condition, we get it back to use on the farm.

We did burn our virgin oil the first two years as fuel, but the oil is worth way more as food. We also are selling chicken and pig meal with our crushed safflower meal. 27% protein!

Hope you have a good harvest.

quote:

Originally posted by powdrluvr: The other 40% is headed for the fryer, under one condition, we get it back to use on the farm.

That sounds like the oil-leasing program McDonald's was using/is using. There was a company in Minneapolis that leased their oil to McDonald's in a multi-state region and then got it back to make biodiesel. They were called Environmental Solutions or something like that.

They are also using their oil as fuel now in the UK, or presumably still are: you don't see press releases for when a project fails.

quote:

Originally posted by powdrluvr:
We built a custom food grade processing facility and plan on selling ALL of our safflower as food oil.

Was there any major issues or extra expenses getting setup to sell as food grade? The oil leasing option is something I've been interested in for a while.

Nice work all.

-Ken