Save farming.
Wean the country off fossil fuels.
Stop global warming. Create jobs.
All this, and turn fields ablaze with gorgeous yellow flowers.
There’s a lot expected of a plant with a name so ugly that it was given a new one.
Local Snohomish County farmers are experimenting with canola, an environmentally friendly plant they say could help solve some of the nation’s biggest problems.
The oily plant with a blazing yellow flower is being used to make biodiesel, a cleaner burning renewable version of petroleum-based diesel. Canola is mainly known for producing vegetable oil for cooking. It stands for Canadian Oil Low Acid. It’s old name is rapeseed.
As much as 250 million gallons of biodiesel already are manufactured per year in the United States. Most is made from soybeans grown in the Midwest.
Now canola biodiesel is becoming more important as more farmers try growing it, said Jenna Higgins Rose, a spokeswoman for the Missouri-based National Biodiesel Board, Jefferson City, Mo.
“We’ve seen very strong growth in the biodiesel industry,” Higgins Rose said. “Production doubles and triples every year.”
She said the best crop for making biodiesel depends on the geographic region, adding that it makes sense that canola would emerge in Washington state because canola plants grow well here.
Biodiesel has already caught on with a growing group of early-adopters.
And government fleet managers also are using blends of biodiesel to power trucks and buses because it burns cleaner, reduces global warming emissions and supports local farmers.
While most biodiesel supporters have focused on growing canola in Eastern Washington, a handful of local farmers believe that Western Washington could be the optimal place to grow it.
Last spring four Snohomish County farmers planted several strains of canola on 50 acres of farmland.
Things didn’t start well.
Too many seeds went into the ground. Planting was more than a month late.The farmers had so little experience and so many doubts that they didn’t even make arrangements to harvest their canola.
“I was amazed because they brought in a few spindly plants (to look at),” said Kate Painter, an analyst with Washington State University’s Center for Sustaining Agriculture and Natural Resources.
“They looked horrible,” she said. “I thought, I don’t think this is going to be worth looking at.”
Then she realized that they looked bad because the farmers had planted too many seeds. Conditions were actually so perfect for canola that all of the seeds were surviving and growing.
Cool temperatures, moist sea air and excellent soils make it optimal place to grow the plant that is part of the mustard family. She found that the canola grew four feet tall in three weeks.
“It grows beautifully in Snohomish County,” Painter said.
So much so, that the local farmers nearly doubled the European standard for growing the crop, said Merritt Wolfkill, owner of Feed and Fertilizer Co. in Monroe and Stanwood.
“I didn’t think, the first trial out of the gates, that we would blow the doors off,” Wolfkill said. “That was kind of a shock.”
In Europe, the typical canola farmer produces 84 gallons of biodiesel per acre of planted canola. Last year Snohomish County farmers averaged 158 gallons of biodiesel per acre.
Painter expressed caution, saying that it’s still a break-even proposition until diesel prices climb a bit higher.
A 100 percent blend of biodiesel currently cost $3.15 to $3.25 per gallon at Dr. Dan’s Alternative Fuel Werks in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood.
The average diesel price in the Everett-Seattle-Bellevue area was $2.97 per gallon on Friday, according to a daily fuel gauge report maintained by AAA.
Using canola to make biodiesel is particularly challenging because it’s about 30 cents to 40 cents per gallon more expensive than biodiesel made out of soy. That makes canola biodiesel a tough sell even to those willing to pay more to avoid using fossil fuels.
“I always urge caution – to start small,” Painter said. “Hopefully we’re going to have a good price and a good market. We don’t want it to bomb, because people were sour on it.”
In a way it’s good that biodiesel development in Snohomish County is in its infancy, she said.
As fossil fuels become more scarce and prices at the pump climb, farmers and biodiesel producers have time to perfect their craft, hopefully lowering the cost of production along the way.
Already canola biodiesel is getting more competitive with its soy counterpart, said John Williams, a spokesman for Seattle-based Imperium Renewables, soon to be the nation’s largest producer of biodiesel.
“The real question, I think, is how the price of soy and canola relates to diesel,” Williams said.
Like gasoline, the price of diesel has shot up over the past two months and is expected to climb higher during the summer driving season.
“Biodiesel was cheaper than diesel for seven months last year,” Williams said. “(We) expect biodiesel, even canola biodiesel, to be competitive this summer as well.”
Dr. Dan’s customers in Ballard would pay more for biodiesel if they knew it was grown locally, said owner Dan Freeman.
“Everybody is excited about locally grown and produced fuel,” he said. “It reduces your energy footprint.”
Williams added that canola costs more because it’s a much higher-grade fuel, sort of like burning premium unleaded versus regular unleaded.
Snohomish County’s canola-growing experiment was so successful last year that local farmers are looking at it as a potential second cash crop to augment the milk or vegetables that they now produce.
Three local farmers are about to plant canola on nearly 500 acres of prime farmland, a substantial investment in the still developing technology.
Dan Bartelheimer, manager of Sno-Valley Farms in Snohomish, plans to plant 300 acres, the largest crop.
“I’m sticking my neck out” because growing the fuel we use to keep this country’s vehicles moving could save farming.
“Agriculture nationally is in a steep decline,” he said. “If I can be a small part of trying to revitalize it, I’m willing to do that.”
Peter Alden of Alden Farms of Monroe plans to plant 80 acres of canola and Dale Reiner of Reiner Farms in Monroe plans to grow 50 acres.
The farmers have partnered with Wolfkill, the local seed and fertilizer supplier, and Snohomish County to keep the momentum gained from last year going.
The mash left over when the oil is squeezed out of the canola is valuable as a feed for cattle. Alden, an organic farmer, is particularly interested in selling it to organic dairy farmers.
Canola is also a good rotation crop for Alden’s organic potatoes or the corn that dairies grow to feed their cows, Wolfkill said.
Farmers in north Snohomish and Skagit counties worry that the crop could contaminate their vegetable seed crops, Alden said, adding that he grows seeds.
Painter believes carefully managing when and where canola is planted will help farmers avoid the cross-pollination problem.
The farmers’ biggest obstacle – other than getting a good price for their canola seed – looks to be rainy fall weather, which will prevent the canola from drying out naturally in the field.
The solution is a plant dryer, which Snohomish County plans on installing at the old Cathcart Landfill. The dryer will be powered by methane produced as millions of tons of 1980s and ’90s garbage rots below ground.
The county couldn’t commit to getting the dryer operational by this fall, so Wolfkill promised to work with the farmers to make sure a temporary dryer is in place.
Snohomish County will have a dryer working at Cathcart by fall 2008, said Deanna Carveth, a senior planner in Snohomish County’s solid waste management division.
Snohomish County contributed $30,000 to last year’s canola-growing experiment and has committed to spending another $125,000 over the next two years, Carveth said.
Investing in biodiesel is part of County Executive Aaron Reardon’s focus on farming.
The goal is to power the county’s fleet of 325 diesel vehicles and equipment from canola grown in Snohomish County. The county will need 120,000 gallons of biodiesel per year to run the fleet on a 20 percent blend of biodiesel. The fleet uses 600,000 gallons of diesel per year.
A year-old state law passed last year requires that 2 percent of diesel be nonpetroleum. There are provisions to expand that requirement to 5 percent.
The National Biodiesel Board’s goal is to see biodiesel take over 5 percent of the diesel market in the United States by 2015.
Merritt Wolfkill sees growing canola as an opportunity to help keep Snohomish County farms in business – and keep his own family business alive.
“We’re not going to dive head first into something until we’re sure it’s the right way to go,” Wolfkill said. “I think it’s going to work.”
In addition to helping get a dryer for drying out the crop, Wolfkill has promised to buy a grinder that will crush the oil out of the canola seed that local farmers grow, a key step in making biodiesel. He plans to have the crusher in place and working by fall 2008.
His company sells farmers the seed they plant, the fertilizer they feed their crops and the equipment they use to tend their fields. Perhaps most important, it commits to buying the crops the farmers produce when harvest time comes.
The fourth-generation company, started in 1938, is trying to help third- and fourth-generation farmers survive.
Perhaps that’s why Wolfkill is approaching the canola experiment with caution.
He said dozens of farmers went belly up in Moses Lake when a sugar beet craze went bad in 1990s.
“If we have a disaster like that here in this valley with canola oil, they will never grow it again,” he said.
Dale Reiner is growing the canola on 50 acres of his farmland this year as a nod to its future potential, not to make money right away.
“It gives us another choice,” Reiner said. He called it “staying nimble.” This gives the farmers opportunities to do a variety of tings so that they don’t have all of their eggs in one basket.
Snohomish County is the state’s fastest growing county, and those new people are putting pressure on farmers, he said.
The goal is to bring farming back to the forefront as fossil fuels are phased out, Reiner said.
“It’ll entice young people to come into ag,” he said. “That will keep it a viable industry going into the future. We should have done this years ago.”
Wolfkill agreed.
“This is the best soil in the country,” he said. “If you don’t farm it, what happens? It gets covered with concrete. Then you can never farm it again. That’s a damn shame.”
Reporter Lukas Velush: 425-339-3449 or lvelush@heraldnet.com.
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