Projects

2020 NCR-SARE Farmer-Rancher Grant

We are so thrilled to have been selected for a Farmer-Rancher Grant from the North Central Region of USDA's Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education program. This grant funded a full year of growing winter camelina, to demonstrate its feasibility and contribution to sustainable farming in western South Dakota. Follow the progress of this project in Jenny's Blog and view Final Results here!

Our First Crop

Here we go! We planted our first-ever camelina crop in the fall of 2019. It's only 8 acres; we wanted to get some experience with the crop before jumping into the SARE grant project (see below)

This crop was harvested by a neighbor with a combine. We cleaned the seed by hand using soil sieves. This was a lot of work! Then a sample of the cleaned seed was taken to Dakota Lakes Research Farm just of Pierre, South Dakota to be cold-pressed. Thanks to Dr. Dwayne Beck for his support of this project.

Forging ahead

We have lots of plans for the future with camelina! Some things we'd like to investigate include:

Using camelina to replace fish oil and fish meal for aquaculture feeds
Adding camelina oil to winter feed supplements for cattle
Feeding camelina meal to broiler chickens to improve fatty acid ratios for human health benefits

If you have some great ideas, we'd love to hear about them!