Originally Posted by 76supercab2
Interesting. Once you get the oil, how far are you from fuel? Is canola a summer or winter crop? How much fuel do you consume to make the crop?
The possiblity I see is for a farm that procuces it's own fuel from canola, then a food crop in the off season. Say summer canola, then winter wheat. Sell the wheat at market for a cash crop. Make the canola to be independant of fuel prices (still have to buy fertilizer and weed killer). Possibly even sell extra fuel oil to other farmers. (can't sell it for road use or you WILL have the gov't down on you.)
Ok, where do I start............We use our own biodiesel to farm, so we have minimal farming cost. You can grow canola as a winter crop, or a spring crop, but with spring planting the yeald is reduced by 25 percent. Planting rates are 8lb/acre vs 80-100lb/acre for wheat, our cost for seed was $3.50/acre.
Winter canola is VERY sensitive to planting time. In our area planting must be done by Sept 15th, if you don't plant till oct 15 the yeald drops by aprox 30-40 percent! Our spacing is 16" between rows, Canola is a LARGE plant!
You are close to what we're trying to acheve: As an example.....
Farmer "A" farms 5,000 acres of dry land wheat and uses 10,000 gal of dino-diesel / year. If he plants 133 acres of winter canola and acheves 150 / gal of oil / acre [low side of average] his yeald would be 19,950 gal of oil. If he joins a Co-Op with 5 others and they all pool their yeald together the farmer gets 10,000 gal/ fuel for next year, and the Co-Op gets 9,950 gal of oil that it can sell on the open market for a profit! All for the cost of planting and harvesting. Plus the Co-Op has the "feed-meal" [60 percent of total weight of seed] to sell to cattle feed-lots [at $135-$145 per ton] The farmer gets the fuel he needs CHEAP, and shares in the profit from the sale of the fuel and the feed-meal! One thing I am working on is taking the glycerol and combining it with waste straw to form fuel-pellets that have a market value here of $145/ton...........another "profit center". At present I'm under contract with 3 countys to form Co-Op's, and I've got a request to give another speach in another county 125 miles away.
As far as the oil-press I ordered, I'll have to dig a little to find the link to the exporter I'm using but you can see the model I ordered on ebay: #7612984437 Their price was $1,995, but I found their importer and bought it for $500 cheaper.
FABMANDELUX.
