Get Training on Oil Crops
- Increase the number of crops you are considering growing on your farm.
- Expand the sources of your farm’s income.
- As a provider of products or services to farms, broaden your understanding of agricultural crop production.
Oil crop products can be used to make a wide range of goods, including food, biofuels, cosmetics, medicines, cleaning supplies, and much more. There is a huge market for plant-based oils; every year, more than 200 million metric tonnes of edible oils are produced.
Who should take this course?
- A farmer looking to expand their crop selection,
- aspiring upskilled farm labourers
- newcomers to the industry, whether they are farmers or not
- Anybody interested in learning more about cultivating oil crops, including investors, service providers, consultants, students, and others
Lesson Structure
There are 9 lessons in this course:
- Nature & scope of oil crops
- What are plant oils?
- Essential oils
- Plant oil crops & uses
- Vegetable oil uses
- Essential oil uses
- Economic value of oil crops
- What crops can be grown where?
- Oil extraction
- Introduction
- Oil seed processing
- Mechanical processing
- Chemical processing
- Other processing methods
- Distillation
- Simple distillation
- Steam distillation
- Fractional distillation
- Vacuum distillation
- Molecular distillation
- Extractive distillation
- Membrane distillation
- Canola and rapeseed
- Characteristics of canola
- World production
- Growing canola
- Using seed
- Soil types
- Soil preparation
- Sowing
- Growth stages
- Environmental stresses
- Nutrition
- Irrigation management
- Weeds
- Pest control
- Diseases
- Harvesting
- Storage
- Processing
- Olive oil
- Characteristics of olive oil
- World production
- Growing olives
- Using seedlings
- Soil types
- Soil preparation
- Planting
- Pruning
- Growing conditions
- Varieties
- Nutrition
- Irrigation management
- Weeds
- Pest control
- Diseases
- Organic production
- Harvesting
- Storage
- Processing
- Other edible oils
- Growing conditions
- Organic matter
- Soil texture
- Subsoil PH
- Soil water available to plants
- Slope of the topography
- Natural soil drainage
- Maintaining good soil structure
- Growing edible oil crops
- Sunflowers (helianthus annuus)
- Flax/linseed (linum usitatissimum)
- Soybean/soya bean (glycine max)
- Peanuts (arachis hypogaea)
- Herbal and pharmaceutical oils
- Introduction
- Pros and cons of herbal medicine & nutraceuticals
- Essential oils
- General guidelines for growing herbs for essential oils
- Planting
- Agronomy
- Improved herbs and essential oils
- Growing select crops for cosmetic or pharmaceutical oils
- Avocado (persea americana)
- Mint (mentha arvensis)
- Tea tree (melaleuca alternifolia)
- Blackcurrant (ribes nigrum)
- Passionfruit (passiflora edulis)
- Biofuel and other industrial oils
- Biofuel production
- Vegetable oils and genetic modification
- Extraction of oils from plants
- GMO crops
- Oleic acid
- Oil palm trees
- Novel fatty acids
- Chemical and biotechnological transformations of basic industrial oils
- Key targets for future industrial oil crops
- Unusual fatty acids
- Industrial importance
- Growing select crops for biofuels and other industrial uses
- Poppy (papaver somniferum)
- Castor bean (ricinus communis)
- Camelina (camelina sativa)
- Crambe (crambe abyssinica)
- Issues, Risks, Optimising success
- Successful farming
- Capital
- Profitability
- Risk management
- Succession
- Entrepreneurial skills of farmers
- Production management
- Developing a farming business plan
- Goals and mission
- Asset planning
- Land
- Irrigation water
- Livestock
- Farm management
- Labour and machinery
- Capital
- Soil testing
- Produce selection
- Integrated pest management
- Integrated weed management
- Grain storage
- Product development and management
- Oilseed production and extraction yields
- Oil fatty acid composition and biodiesel
- Oil extraction and biodiesel processing
- On-farm oil seed processing
Each lesson culminates in an assignment which is submitted to the school, marked by the school’s tutors and returned to you with any relevant suggestions, comments, and if necessary, extra reading.
Aims
- Discuss the scope and nature of growing plants for oils or items containing oils.
- Describe the process for obtaining oils from plants.
- Describe the canola and rapeseed farming process.
- Provide instructions on how to grow olives for oil.
- Talk about the production of different edible oils for human and animal consumption, as well as agronomic farming.
- Discuss the production of various oils for aesthetic and therapeutic purposes as well as agronomic farming.
- Discuss the production of plant oils for use in industry and biofuels as well as agronomic farming.
- Examine factors that affect a plant oil producing business’s ability to succeed or fail.
- Create a plan for the growth and administration of a business producing plant oil.
Selecting the Plants to Grow and the Methods to Use
Making the correct decisions about what to plant, when to grow it, where to grow it, and how to grow it can make farming an oil crop lucrative.
Making those decisions is essential for the success of farming as a business, and taking this course can significantly improve your capacity to do so.
It is crucial to take production and processing expenses into account when contemplating cultivating any crop for plant oils. You might be thinking about changing your farm’s focus to cultivating just oilseed crops, or you might be thinking about including oil crops through crop rotations. You can be a farm manager seeking for new prospects or you may have plans to start a new oilseed farm. No of the circumstance, minimising risks and making informed decisions require having a solid understanding of prices.
Learn to weigh the costs and profits of producing feedstock, crushing oilseeds, and producing biodiesel. It will be determined how productive, expensive, and profitable the oilseed feedstocks canola, flax, camelina, yellow mustard, sunflower, and safflower are.
Take into account the yield, technical specifications, market prices, and the cost of production. Take into account outside variables like societal costs and trends like shifting political, financial, and legal considerations. For instance, the manufacturing of biofuel is only commercially viable when the social cost is taken into account. Reducing reliance on fossil fuels by switching to renewable energy sources is a key driver of national biofuel policy.
