Just wondering how many of you are growing or are thinking about growing your own oil? This is our second year growing canola. We have 75 acres of canola this spring and will also plant soybeans this year.

How much oil did you end up with last year?

fuelfarmer;
I almost wept for joy at seeing your beautiful yellow flowers. Congratulations ! You know that silly grin Rudolf Diesel has on his face in the pics we see of him ? His mind's eye was looking into the future at your canola field. Nice job.

fabricator, this is just a good guess. We got around 900 gallons of canola and close to 2000 gallons of soy oil. We started out blending before the processor followed me home.

Legal Eagle, I now use a new term,"oil garden". It is hard to describe how beautiful the crop looks in full bloom.

That field made me think that those flowers must smell awefully nice! You know, the smell of saving money.

quote:

Originally posted by fuelfarmer:
fabricator, this is just a good guess. We got around 900 gallons of canola and close to 2000 gallons of soy oil. We started out blending before the processor followed me home.

Legal Eagle, I now use a new term,"oil garden". It is hard to describe how beautiful the crop looks in full bloom.

Very cool, Do you put down fertilizer with beans or canola? The price of fertilizer round here is crazy this year, 12/12/12 $12 bux a bag, 18/18/18 $16 bux a bag, crazy stuff man.

fuelfarmer;
It would be a major upheaval of things but mustard would give the same lovely yellow flowers, attract bees (please do no GMO the bees) who LOVE the stuff and help polinate and increase yield. Benefit is that mustard is a natural pestcide and it's mulch is suitable for organic farming and if done on a rotation the soy fields would also benefit from the left over from mustard's properties.
The bad is that you cannot have canola and mustard in the same AREA, not field, as apprarently even though they are both of the brasica family they do not cross polinate well at all.
**The above is from stuff I studied and have no real life personal experience with. My one attempt at growing mustard ended up in a drowned field and I lost the crop.**

I am still VERY impressed, nice job.

quote:

Very cool, Do you put down fertilizer with beans or canola? The price of fertilizer round here is crazy this year, 12/12/12 $12 bux a bag, 18/18/18 $16 bux a bag, crazy stuff man.

We spread turkey litter (crap) on the canola ground before planting in the Fall and then spread more on the crop in the spring. The litter has around 60 lbs. of nitrogen per ton and other fertilizer elements. The turkey litter comes out of our own barns. Soy beans need some fertilizer but no nitrogen.

Fuelfarmer: I've always been interested on getting my own oil in the future. I was thinking about getting it from corn (I plan to use the corn later on to produce ethanol). Do you know how much oil can I expect from each ton of corn?
And about the press: is there a not-too-expensive press that would be suitable for a homeowner to get, let's say, 50 gallons of oil a day?
BTW: nice picture! I see you're having a really hard life...

I too am dreaming about growing my own oil. My families farm has about 95 acres of row crop land. I want to be able to grow canola as a winter cover crop, so Dad can still raise what he wants in the summer. He has brought it up a few times...says he wants to talk to the ASC office, and we are having a little trouble getting seed. A University in Kansas is the closest source I've found so far.

Not sure how well it will do here in south eastern Nebraska...

REdlance;
If your land is a little on the arid side you could look at camelina as an option.

Thanks Legal, I followed your link, and that sounds like a good alternative. I'll look into it more. Our land is not any more arid then the rest of this area, we grow soy, wheat and sorghum (milo), as well as alfalfa all without irrigation.

Farmer, which press are you using? And is it heated?

Also, are you able to sell your press cake for a decent price? IE, would you be better off selling the seed, and buying fuel? At current market prices, I often wonder...

quote:

this is just a good guess. We got around 900 gallons of canola and close to 2000 gallons of soy oil.

Can you guess at how much fuel you used to produce that much oil? What fuel did you use?

fuelfarmer --

Is that organic canola, ie, no pesticides, herbicides, or industrially produced fertilizers?
If so, I wonder how much value would be in the oil itself, sold for food rather than used or sold for fuel?

Even if not organic, the oil is probably worth a lot as food these days, given the economic situation....

Have you done a comparison on this -- food vs fuel?

Hello Provo, welcome back to the forum!

I had a look and see you have been back for about a month.

bernyjb,
Corn is not a good oil crop for home pressing. I have read that corn has less than 3% oil. Canola seeds are 40% oil and soybeans are 20% oil. I am sure corn oil is solvent extracted. Not something you do at home.
A small Chines press can be found for 1000 to 1500 dollars.

RedLance,
We are using a Chines press rated at 4 tons per day. That would be a long day. The press is not heated. We do heat the beans before they go into the press. The press is somewhat automated so we can start the thing and just check on it every now and then
We feed all of the press cake to our own cows. It is saving us a ton of money. Have you seen the price of soybean meal. For us it works good to press oil,make fuel, and feed the cake. Our cows can have their cake and eat it too. Sorry

john galt,
I don' have a clue how much fuel was used. The canola was planted using 70/30 diesel/soyoil blend. The soybeans that yielded the oil were planted using dino-diesel. This years crops will be planted and harvested using B50 or better.

provo,
Last year the canola was not "organic"' but it was not sprayed at all and had no commercial fertilizer applied. This year we sprayed for cabbage seed weevils. The little bugs really lowered the yield last year.
The oil would be worth a lot as food. Maybe up to$20 per gallon if marketed at the right place. I have though a lot about food grade oil. Our shop is not "food grade" at this time. The thing to do would be to start over in a building where the environment could be controlled a little better. Another problem is liability. It could all be worked out. I was excited to get one quart of oil when this project was started. Maybe now I can think about doing something else with the oil.

How much oil per acre do you expect to get from the canola this year?

Thanks fuelfarmer, for the info. That about covers what I needed to know.

quote:

Originally posted by cfunderburg:
How much oil per acre do you expect to get from the canola this year?

I would like to get over 100 gal. per acre.

I've heard that Rapeseed oil is often too acidic to be a good food grade oil, while canola technically only refers to the top 2% of that Rapeseed crop which is good enough for food. If all that oil is food grade it would be wortha tremendous amount of money. My place of employment has a small seafood kitchen and we use pure canola oil, in FL it goes for around $32-33 per 4.5 gallon jug, it may have gone up since then that was a couple months ago(or down I suppose). Canola makes great biodiesel though, the stuff I have made with mixed canola, corn and soybean stock is good to 25-30* without gelling(or colder) at B100. Is it hard to grow? I was unable to find very much info on growing this stuff for an AOM course I was taking last fall.