By CELESTE BAUMGARTNER
Ohio Correspondent

CINCINNATI, Ohio — Great Plains-The Camelina Co. announced that 2009 has been a year of explosive growth; contract growing expanded more than 200 percent, said CEO Sam Huttenbauer.
Camelina, an oilseed, has been used for biodiesel for three years. Great Plains has produced more than 15 million road miles of biodiesel from the crop, Huttenbauer said. They have sold 24,000 gallons of camelina oil to be used for jet fuel.

“One of the company’s missions is to continually improve the crop by improving the per-acre yields” he said. “As we drive the yields up, we drive the cost of the fuel down.”

After working with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to gain approval for the crop to be used as livestock feed, Great Plains is now marketing camelina meal for broiler chickens. In the past eight months more than 5 million pounds of camelina meal has been used just for that.

Camelina meal is high in protein and vitamin E and is a great source of omega-3 fatty acids and energy. Previous studies found that meat from chickens fed omega-3-enriched meals contain omega-3 fatty acids, resulting in healthier meat for human consumption, Huttenbauer said.

Also, in 2009 the company introduced nine new varieties of camelina to boost yields, Huttenbauer said. Great Plains has exclusive access to the world’s largest collection of camelina germplasm. The nine new varieties released this year came out of that collection.

These new varieties provide growers of the biofuel crop more options that can be tailored to their climate and geography. Work is also being done on those varieties to increase resistance to Class 2 herbicides.

“We took nine of the new varieties which we have developed and are releasing this year, and genetically modified them so that they were herbicide-resistant,” Huttenbauer said. “We did that in record time; it took us 90 days to get to a first-generation crop, which is impressive for that kind of work.”

There had been an issue that residual Class 2 herbicides were impacting yields, especially in large portions of the Pacific Northwest. Class 2 herbicide-resistant camelina would be a desirable product to open up acreage and also, to improve the yield of the crops in areas that have residual effects, Huttenbauer said.

While that research mainly affected the Pacific Northwest, other research will make growing camelina in the Midwest more desirable.
“We are doing some research in double-cropping Camelina with soybeans in Ohio; results have been good,” he said. “Part of that work is really looking at our germplasm collection and trying to determine which varieties work best in this geographic area.”
Great Plains has been selective in where it has chosen to commercially move forward with this crop.

“Not because it can’t grow in most of North America, but because we want to make sure that the grower, when he actually gets the crop to plant, is going to have a very positive experience,” Huttenbauer said. “In order for us to understand that, we’ve got to understand the agronomy of the region and have worked to determine which varieties are going to make the most sense, to maximize their yields.”

Camelina is one of the leading next-generation biofuel crops, Huttenbauer said. It is a sustainable, non-food crop that can grow in rotation. It can grow on marginal land and requires limited input in terms of fertilizer, pesticide and water. It is a short season, 90-day crop and is cold-tolerant.

Anyone interested in learning more about growing camelina in test plots should contact Great Plains Oil & Exploration, LLC at 877-922-6645 toll free or visit www.camelinacompany.com