Jatropha for Dummies - Part 2 - The plant's future is non-toxic

Fruit cluster on a non-toxic breeding plant (Bionic orchard, Ghana)

After lots of painful experience during the first generation of commercial Jatropha projects - attempting to exploit the toxic plants potential for biodiesel - many are skeptical regarding a possible success for this cop. Still, groups of professional plant developers have formed worldwide working to convert the wild species Jatropha curcas into a viable commercial energy crop. Combined with an ever increasing flow of scientific reports exploring all aspects of this promising species it can be seen by now: success will only be a matter of time.

While contemporary reports on Jatropha development usually keep staring at incumbent  farming projects which are still struggling with all the typical generation 1 problems, be it planting material or agronomic practices, Jatropha has long shown its enormous potential in all aspects of planting material improvement. The results are clearly visible in the breeding orchards around the world and in many insider reports.

The future of Jatropha is non-toxic, which will make it one of the most profitable crops for farmers ever planted. After pressing the oil from the seeds the remaining seed cake will be a highly valuable raw material for animal feed mixes exceeding even the protein content of soy meal. Jatropha seed meal was falsely considered inevitably toxic and difficult to detoxify. The solution to the problem is the creating of non-toxic cultivars based on wild accessions from the center of origin as parental material. Here at Bionic Palm we are among the world leaders in this sector of plant development...

Protein rich feed materials are in high demand around the world and increasingly expensive. Therefore non-toxic Jatropha is not only breaking the profitability barrier for Jatropha farming projects but also reversing the feed price squeeze in many tropical regions thus allowing poultry rearing and aquaculture to become good SME businesses ounce again.

There is a wide genetic diversity in Jatropha germplasm formerly unexploited which can be found at the center of origin. This allows successful breeding for improved planting material including the introduction of the non-toxic trait. Interspecific hybridization offers a second route to an increased genetic spread for selection of superior traits. Bionic Palm has been using both aspects systematically from the very beginning of the Jatropha Breeder 3.0 program.

Jatropha is ideal in support of advanced agroforestry concepts helping to reclaim depleted soil formerly used for mining and unsustainable farming. With a growing environmental awareness in developing countries requirements are increasing for mining operations to reduce their environmental impact including carbon emissions. Non-toxic Jatropha offers enormous possibilities to convert growing sustainability budgets from simple cost items into effective investments as mining operations are usually also large energy consumers.

Alleys of pruned Jatropha prepared for vegetable planting (Bionic test farm, Ghana)

Jatropha can play a major role in adaptation to the effects of climate change in the tropical and sub-tropical regions. Advanced Jatropha cultivars will exhibit an increased drought tolerance and offer capabilities to withstand the expected climatic changes in the tropics. Jatropha hedges planted in combination with food crops under irrigation will help protect the latter from the increasingly harsh environmental situation.

See also:
Jatropha for Dummies - Part 1 - The problem
Jatropha for Dummies - Part 3 - The Farming

Bionic Palm has launched the Jatropha Breeder 3.0 Blog

After experimenting with the idea for almost a year Bionic Palm MD Ulrich B Riemann has finally decided to officially launch his new blog "The Jatropha Breeder 3.0 by Bionic Palm". This coincides with the successful end of an almost 24 months proof-of-concept (POC) testing our various ideas and concepts to improve the immensely under-performing Jatropha curcas species in its potential role as an energy and feed crop.

We were able to demonstrate with great success that our vision of high performing non-toxic Jatropha cultivars is not a dream, but in many ways a reality. Before the POC ended June 30th we were able to develop the first 12 seedlings of a highly variable back-cross generation (BC1). This generation of unique hybrids will be a cornerstone for various promising breeding approaches to come. Going forward many high yielding non-toxic and toxic varieties will be developed. We expect to reach our initial target of a high performing non-toxic elite cultivar within the coming 24 months. Field testing has already started with some unique early non-toxic intraspecific hybrids which will be used in long term poultry feed trials starting later this year.

Here at the Bionic Group we are all very excited to see what was achievable so far with a small network of scientific partners from Europe and a very small budget. A significant amount of valuable IP has been generated which will lead to a number of patent applications in the near future.

Jatropha for Dummies - Part 1 - The Crunch

I meet all these people lately asking me, hey, "what are you doing down there in Africa..." and I say: "Jatropha farming my friend" trying to be as brief as possible. 95% of the time I either get a blank look or a "Huu Jat... eh... what did you say? Never heard of it."

This is hard to believe for somebody who has spent every day of his live since 2008 with the ups and downs of this business but its the plain truth, most people don't have the slightest idea what I am talking about... So usually quite hesitantly I start going on: "You know, its this new crop people talk about a lot recently for producing non-edible oil to be used in airplanes replacing some of today's fossil jet fuels and get the airlines' carbon balance right". Ahh, they say, "like palm oil isn't it? But isn't that bad for the environment?"

Listening to this again and again and reading all those vastly unfounded reports from NGO's bashing a very promising future energy and animal feed crop that has not even fully emerged the "breeder's drawing board" yet has finally convinced me to start writing this small series of articles. It should help those interested and with an open mind to understand better what the whole thing is about.

I myself am the MD of Bionic Palm in Ghana and a Jatropha farmer, but even more an active breeder of future high yielding Jatropha and a developer of all kinds of "agronomic" techniques aiming to make this plant a profitable and highly sustainable source of energy and protein. We work with partners from around the world who share our motivation.

There is an obvious high disappointment by many with Jatropha by many investors and downstream oil users, however, this is a notion commonly not shared by long standing experienced researchers of the plant. Now, why is that so?

Jatropha (to be correct "Jatropha curcas Linn" or for us from here on simply JcL) is a native of Central America and a member of a large genus of approx. 172 different species. It offers a lot of interesting features as a biological system that have never been fully explored.  JcL was brought to Africa and Asia many hundred years ago by the Portuguese. Until recently its use was mainly limited to serving as hedges separating cattle from fields and controlling mosquitoes with a small side use for soap and candle making. Therefore, there was never any serious domestication of the plant and for many decades it was basically left to itself until it was rediscovered in Africa and India as a possible feedstock source for biodiesel. The big hype that followed with investors was never founded on well thought through agronomic and business plans and definitely not based on a sound scientific understanding of JcL specifically or its taxonomic genus in general. Only a small number of reports had been published on the plant and only a handful of scientists had ever studied it. (A situation that significantly changed over the last 5 years.)

Still the investors of the early years concentrated on the acquisition of hundreds of thousands of hectars and started planting rapidly without ever truly analyzing the material they were working with. The back lash came quickly: The near wild plants they chose to plant with enormous financial efforts did not perform anywhere near as expected in their presentations. They all left out a very simple rule of agricultural projects: testing, testing, testing... When they started realizing their mistakes it was already too late. The investors' money was gone and projects failing everywhere as they were never planned right in the first place. And then the global financial crisis hit, so no fresh money was available anywhere. Today we find large numbers of suspended or even completely abandoned projects from those days especially all over Africa.

It didn't take long and legions of would be experts started blaming and criticizing JcL as the wrong approach for an endless number of reasons. However, since the people writing all the negative reports are not remotely the same kind of experts on JcL as they are on negative report writing, very few sound, business oriented assessments surfaced over the last few years. We have recently reported about one here.

But mostly unrecognized in public, in the background there was some profound practical and scientific work starting. While industry, finance and politics started abandoning JcL everywhere many researchers and agronomists picked up the subject and started for the first time some serious work on tha5t crop.

This author made some simple statements in a presentation given at a conference in 2008 in Accra:
(Here you can find a later, refined version of this very presentation)

"The Jatropha value chain is financially not working out for the early producers".

But, the statement continued: "the outlook is positive once the following conditions are met:
1 - high yielding domesticated cultivars become available
2 - improved agronomic methods increase yields
3 - JcL specific mechanization technology becomes available"

Today I would add a statement about non-toxic cultivars or (less preferable) successful detoxification of the press cake in order to be able to use it as animal feed.

It was all clear in 2008 (while most still presented their old business models and some even do it until today), what is stated in more an more scientific reports: we need better planting material to begin with! However, improving planting material by large margins has been done again and again, so why not with JcL? Its quite impressive to study the history of the development of some common crops like maize with yield improvements of several hundred percent over the last 50-100 years.

In spite of the permanent flow of critical reporting, new strategies have been put in place around the world to change the JcL picture regarding all of the above mentioned points.

For example a company called SG Biofuels from San Diego, California has launched its Jatropha 2.0 platform with a lot of marketing hype (prematurely as I think) while we at Bionic Palm started our Bionic JcL3.0 initiative focused on Africa but actually reaching out much further than SGB. What all these activities have in common is a more profound approach to overcome the barriers that stopped the early JcL growers.

So what is out there to be expected?

My prediction is for a thriving JcL industry starting to pick up around 2015 with some early adopters of a generation 3 approach. Improved cultivars start coming up and will do so in growing numbers over the next couple of years. We plan to have a first high yielding non-toxic cultivar available for extensive testing by the end of 2013 after finalizing a proof of concept by mid 2012.

The markets, especially for green jet fuel (SPK) sector, will push hard for more supply, as their demand will be rising seriously from 2012 when Europe introduces its new emission policy for all commercial airlines flying in and out of Europe. Therefore the interested industry is already returning to JcL working on all kinds of feasibility reports and finance will start following them as long term off-take agreements become common.

Unfortunately we are currently going through a phase which I call the Jatropha generation 2, where strange people are pushing around clouds, sign long term deals for non existent Jatropha oil and "buy and sell" on the web a commodity that mostly doesn't exist. This is the aftermath of the generation 1 gold rush and will vanish as soon as serious generation 3 projects emerge, based on strategies incorporating sound planting materials and agronomy concepts.

This article will be followed by 4 more attempting to give more insight about what is to be expected from JcL:

Jatropha for Dummies - Part 2 - The future is non-toxic
Jatropha for Dummies - Part 3 - The Farming
Jatropha for Dummies - Part 4 - Equipment and Processing
Jatropha for Dummies - Part 5 - JcL Break Through - But When?

Please visit also our Jatropha Breeder 3.0 Blog where we talk about our breeding platform in more detail.

Bionic Palm's Jatropha hybrid breeding program

1 year ago BPL started breeding for high yielding non-toxic Jatropha hybrids as part of the ambitious BIONIC JCL 3.0 program. Early interspecific hybrid results are very promising. An ongoing proof of concept phase should be completed before the end of 2011.
 
Jatropha curcas Lin (JcL) is a relatively new discovery for the world of non edible plant oils for energy and chemical use as a sustainable substitute for fossil crude oil. However, it is considered a very promising plant by experts given its ability to survive even under the hardest environmental conditions.

JcL hedges form the back bone of Bionic Palm's innovative food and fuel farming concept covering 30% of the farmed land and facilitate the recovery of previously depleted African farmland. 

The planting material currently in use by most plantation projects around the world is commercially insufficient and  mostly defined as wild accessions by scientists. An optimization through professional breeding programs  is desperately needed if this crop is to make it. Only domesticated hybrid varieties will eventually be able to meet investors and farmers expectations in terms of yield, oil quality and other important traits.

In addition, it would be of high commercial value, if "non-toxic" elite varieties could be developed. The byproduct from pressing oil, the oil cake, could be used as a high quality feed material for poultry and fish.

There is evidence from many scientific reports that the development of high yielding and non-toxic hybrids can be achieved through traditional breeding methods. However, the genetic variability of JcL has been reported to be very limited  recently. Therefore, an intraspecific breeding approach as marketed by some protagonists in the industry like SG Biofuels and Quinvita (former D1 plant sciences, just to name two), who are usually boasting with their large collections of Jatropha curcas material from around the world, does not promise stunning break throughs.

Bionic Palm's management team has been listening carefully to the scientific community and is following a radically different approach in its fast track program to make the first non-toxic true elite Jatropha cultivars available. Based on yet unpublished scientific work from the recent past, we have selected the most genetically suited 10 JcL accessions from around the world (including 4 non-toxic ones) together with a number of related varieties from the genus Jatropha as parent plants and mapped out a detailed interspecific hybrid breeding path.

The breeding process will be backed by genetic marker technology thus reducing time requirements by a factor of at least 3. We expect the first patentable results in 24 to 36 months. Bionic Palm has already spent over 18 months, to get the selected parental material in place at its Ghana research facility. The program has taken off in December 2010 with performing the first crossings of the program map.

The program has been designed with three guidelines in mind: Quick results, highly manageable and low risk. Successful results will not only change the economics of JcL profoundly, but also improve the working conditions for farm workers, who often suffer from allergic reactions after some years of intensive exposure to the plant and its seeds.

A special blog called "The Jatropha Breeder" shares more specific information and highlights about this activity.