New Crops May Hold Promise on Drought

Not all of California’s most promising newcomers are people. Lost in a sea of more conventional bounty, 3,000 acres of a seed-bearing plant called canola are growing in the Yolo County area near Sacramento.

Three thousand acres isn’t much, but keep watching. Brassica napus is one of the most promising new crops in California. It makes one of the healthiest cooking oils around, and it takes just a fraction of the water required by many other major crops grown in the region.

California’s seemingly interminable drought has given new impetus to efforts to develop less-thirsty alternative crops, a process that must surmount skepticism as well as impatience, since developing a new commercial crop can take 25 years.

These crops aren’t cactus, but they do have the ability to thrive on less water, coupled with the potential, in the foreseeable future, for profit.

Canola, a variety of rapeseed, is already commercial, but others are still experimental. Buffalo gourd, a Mojave Desert native that only has to be planted once, can yield lubricating oil and alcohol fuel. Guayule yields rubber. Tepary beans can live on the scantest of rain.

And 1,000 acres of a prolific little plant known as kenaf will grow in the San Joaquin Valley this year. An African native now grown worldwide, researchers say kenaf makes a newsprint so absorbent it keeps readers’ hands cleaner. It’s also a natural for environmentally correct packing material, carpet backing, clothing fiber and food.

Change doesn’t always come easily in farming. The National Research Council, which advises the government on science issues, said in a 1989 study that “federal policies work against environmentally benign practices and the adoption of alternative agricultural systems.” Steve Shaffer, the alternative crop expert at the California Department of Agriculture, explains that farmers who get federal subsidies and below-market water for existing crops have no incentive to grow things that make more sense in a desert.

There isn’t much money for research, either. Shaffer is working off a two-year grant of just $115,000, his entire budget. Perhaps 15% of the $82-million University of California budget for agriculture and natural resources research is spent on water conservation, but mostly to improve existing crops. That’s important, but some researchers are convinced that the potential of alternatives is great too.

“California could produce 25% to 30% of its energy needs from biomass, from agricultural products, without affecting our price of food,” Shaffer asserts.

Sweet sorghum is one example. California uses 6 million gallons of ethanol monthly. Shaffer says corn produces 360 gallons per acre. But sorghum yields perhaps 600 gallons per acre, using a third less water and half the fertilizer. It makes great animal feed, too, using half as much water as alfalfa.

Not all the new crops are the plant equivalent of camels. Consider jojoba (pronounced ho-ho-ba). It got a bad name before the 1986 Tax Reform Act as a particularly exotic tax shelter, and the new law combined with bad farming to cause losses of perhaps $200 million to jojoba growers, says Gene Wright, a researcher at the University of Arizona’s Office of Arid Land Studies.

Now, though, jojoba is grown in California for the best of reasons: It fills a need. Jojoba seed oil substitutes well for oil from sperm whales, the hunting of which has been curtailed. It’s used widely in cosmetics, and should have a future as a lubricant.

One problem: Jojoba can live on little water but not very productively. Dennis Slavens, who grows jojoba in Blythe, says it can take nearly five acre-feet of water to make jojoba pay, but that’s still less than rice, which consumes seven acre-feet.

Canola uses just 18 inches. Canola oil has gained popularity as consumers have grown more health conscious. It has less saturated fat than most other oils and is widely available in American supermarkets, but most is made from seed grown in Canada.

“We’re just harvesting it,” says Tom Kearney, field crops farm adviser for the UC Cooperative Extension Service in Yolo County. “It’s the biggest new crop in the state.”

Like most new crops, it’s no panacea. It uses about as much water as winter wheat, but Shaffer says it ought to be about twice as profitable and can be grown on land where there is no summer irrigation at all.

The same is true of kenaf, which is happy on less than two feet of rain. Daniel Kugler, a U.S. Department of Agriculture alternative crop specialist, sees a huge future for it, and Shaffer notes that an entire day’s edition of the Bakersfield Californian newspaper was printed on kenaf paper several years ago.

The list goes on. Guayule, a water-efficient source of rubber, was grown on 30,000 California acres during World War II, says Ali Estalai, a UC Riverside researcher working to raise yields to commercial levels so it can be grown again.

Steven Temple, a UC Davis agronomist, is betting on beans. California grows many kinds now, but Temple says tepary are the most drought-hardy and have been grown in New Mexico and Arizona. Garbanzo beans, already grown commercially in California, are also drought-resistant. Other researchers suggest lupines and bell beans.

Kugler likes industrial crops. Castor, for instance, went out of U.S. production in 1973 but yields strategic acids stockpiled by the Defense Department--and used in lipstick, soap and cans.

These crops don’t just save water. Many require fewer pesticides, because appearance doesn’t count in animal feeds and oil seeds. Kenaf sucks harmful salts from the soil, and kenaf paper could help preserve forests.

Developing commercial markets for these products isn’t easy. Temple notes that a good chunk of the vast Central Valley planted in garbanzo beans--otherwise known as chickpeas--would easily swamp current worldwide demand.

On the other hand, these new crops are held to strict market standards from which many traditional California crops are notoriously exempt. Says William Liebhardt, director of the UC Sustainable Agriculture Research Program: “If you didn’t have the federal government programs, the rice industry, like the corn, wheat and cotton industries, wouldn’t exist as they do now.”

Fortunately, markets for some new crops are beginning to blossom. Wynn Oil, a small Azusa concern, sells a patented jojoba lubricant for automobiles called X-Tend Supreme.

Think new crops never succeed? Kugler says soybeans only caught on in a big way 30 years ago. Now, U.S. farmers grow almost as much soybeans as they do wheat.