Sky high demand for camelina
Washington Ag Today July 7, 2010 The future for the oilseed crop camelina could be sky high. That’s how Washington State University agronomist Bill Schillinger described the potential for camelina in a recent interview. Schillinger: “I rode on three airplanes last week and Delta, Air Canada and Alaska Airlines, all three of those in their back of seat flyers touted how they were going to go green with camelina and that is their future. Right now there is a need for 500-million gallons, right now, just to make a ten percent mix over at the Seattle airport. The Air Force wants to buy it. The Navy wants to buy it. The Air Force has run a 50-50 mix of camelina and jet fuel in the A-10. It runs great. They want to go green too. So the market is sky high, whether they can pay what the grower needs to make a living is another question all together.” Schillinger has been involved in a regional study of growing camelina and research papers on the three-year project should be out this coming winter. Xianming Chen with the ARS at Pullman says stripe rust has been found in barley in the Palouse. He says the disease shouldn’t be as big a problem in barley as it has been in wheat but advises growers to monitor fields and consider a fungicide application if stripe rust incidence reaches ten percent. I’m Bob Hoff and that’s Washington Ag Today on Northwest Aginfo Net.
