Out of fry pan and into the tank with canola?

HARRELLSVILLE -- Curious farmers snapped seed pods from Jimmy Mason's five-acre patch of canola and rubbed the tiny seeds between their fingers as if trying to conjure the future.

The stalky canola plant, raised in a test plot in Hertford County but widely grown in the western United States and Canada, produces tiny black seeds loaded with oil that can be used for cooking -- or powering diesel engines.

Buster Manning of Beaufort County, one of the farmers to come to see the crop, said rising fuel costs to run his tractors had motivated him to find a homegrown solution. He plans to start producing biodiesel for his farm and was giving canola a look.

"After 9/11, we've got to do something to reduce dependence on foreign oil," Manning said.

Some N.C. State University researchers hope canola could do just that and blossom as an alternative energy crop in North Carolina.

"The main goal of our project is to find effective farming systems where you can optimize crops grown for fuel and food in the same acre of land," said Ben Rich, biomass program coordinator for the N.C. Solar Center. "We just need more oil grown in the state to support an emerging biodiesel industry."

The Solar Center, a clearinghouse for research about renewable energy at NCSU, is evaluating the potential for growing crops that could be used as energy sources. States have shown an increasing interest in biodiesel as an alternative to petroleum diesel because it can help meet federal air pollution standards and can be produced domestically.

New U.S. industry

North Carolina is among the top consumers of biodiesel fuel in the United States, using more than 1.5 million gallons in 2005, Solar Center researchers said. Any vehicle that burns diesel can run on biodiesel. Many school buses, city garbage trucks and street sweepers in the Triangle burn a blend of 80 percent petroleum diesel and 20 percent biodiesel made primarily from soybean oil.

But biodiesel can be made from a variety of plant or animal fat-based oils, not just soybeans.

Researchers view canola as an alternative to soybeans as a stock for biodiesel fuel because the plants produce two to three times as much oil as soybeans, and canola oil doesn't turn to gel in cold temperatures as quickly as soybean oil.

Canola is widely used in Europe to make biodiesel. But the industry is just getting started in the United States and Canada. Most of the million acres of canola grown in the northwestern United States goes for cooking oil, said David Thorenson, assistant director of the U.S. Canola Association.

North Carolina has no commercial-scale biodiesel production plants. But Piedmont Biofuels, a cooperative based in Moncure, is ramping up to produce a million gallons a year at a former chemical plant in Pittsboro, starting in late summer. It will use waste vegetable oil from the fry pits at restaurants.

Farmer Jimmy Mason of Harrellsville, in Hertford County, planted the test plot of canola on a few acres of sandy soil that usually grows tobacco. Last week, Mason stood beside the knee-high plants covered with yellow flowers and 2-inch seed pods. The crop, sown last fall, will be ready to harvest in a month. But Mason, who also grows peanuts, tobacco and chickens, isn't sure what will happen to the canola.

"Marketing a crop is the toughest thing for farmers," Mason said.

Researchers at the Solar Center said they would like to use an idle soybean crushing plant to press Mason's canola for oil, then make biodiesel from it. But the details remain to be worked out. The research is funded by a $147,000 grant from the Golden LEAF Foundation, a nonprofit organization established to help tobacco-growing communities make the transition to new crops.

The uncertain fate of Mason's crop sums up the dilemma that farmers face growing canola on a large scale. At present, it isn't an economically feasible crop because there are no nearby facilities to crush the seeds to extract oil.

"This is a classic chicken-and-egg phenomenon," said Kurt Creamer, a research associate at the Solar Center. "Nobody wants to process canola unless there are crops grown here. Nobody wants to grow it unless there are processing facilities.

"Really, we're putting a lot of emphasis on trying to locate and encourage the processing," he said.

Ben Deal, a Georgia farmer working to form an East Coast canola cooperative, said the crop was grown in the early 1990s in Georgia and the Carolinas. But the market disappeared in the mid-1990s -- a victim of corporate buyouts. He said a Pennsylvania company, which he didn't identify, is looking to put three canola production facilities on the East Coast that would create a large demand for canola crops.

"We are on the verge of several excellent possibilities to bring the market back to the Southeast," Deal said. "There is still more money to be made for processing canola into cooking oil. But biodiesel is a hot topic."