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Cargill has awarded $2.5 million to the Forever Green Initiative to support research into two novel oilseed crops 鈥� winter camelina and domesticated pennycress. The five-year grant will accelerate research into crop biology and management.

The Forever Green Initiative is a research platform in the College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Resource Sciences at the University of Minnesota. Leadership is housed in the Department of Agronomy and Plant Genetics.

"This is the largest corporate donation that Forever Green has ever received," said Mitch Hunter, associate director of the Forever Green Initiative.

Winter camelina and domesticated pennycress can produce seed-based oil for low-carbon transportation fuels while also protecting soil, improving water quality and providing new revenue streams for farmers, Hunter said.

"You can plant them in the fall, they go dormant over the winter, and you harvest them the next spring," Hunter said of both crops. "They give you the benefits of a cover crop, for protecting soil and reducing nitrate leaching, and you also get to harvest them."

Both crops produce oilseeds similar to canola but smaller, Hunter said, which can be pressed for oil and high protein meal.

鈥淲inter camelina and pennycress could be truly transformative for farmers, the environment, rural communities and the economy of Minnesota and the Upper Midwest,鈥� said Hunter. 鈥淲e are extremely excited to have this support from Cargill, which will greatly advance our research and help make these crops a reality for farmers.鈥�

Hunter said the money will go directly into the research program of Forever Green, and will help to understand which genes influence which traits. He said all research will be published publicly.

"It will also support agronomic research, and applied work to understand what should farmers do when they want to grow these crops, and what are the best practices, and how can they do it profitably, successfully and get good yields," he said.

Winter camelina and pennycress could be a "major climate solution for hard-to-electrify parts of the transportation sector," according to Forever Green because the seed oil can be refined into "drop-in replacements for jet fuel and diesel and could reduce emissions by more than 60% compared to petroleum jet fuel or diesel."

鈥淲inter camelina and domesticated pennycress have the potential to address key sustainability challenges in agricultural supply chains, including water quality concerns and demand for low-carbon fuel feedstocks," said Lyle DePauw, crop innovation director for Cargill.

The oil can also be used for food, biopolymers and other industrial applications, and the high-protein meal can be used for animal feed, according to Forever Green.

Forever Green Initiative, labeled as an international leader in the development of winter camelina and pennycress, . Integrating perennial crops with crops like corn and soybean is a strategy that Forever Green refers to as 鈥渃ontinuous living cover鈥� agriculture.

by Forever Green, Friends of the Mississippi River and EcoTone Analytics showed that with widespread adoption in Minnesota, continuous living cover agriculture could reduce nitrogen loss from farmland by 23% and soil erosion by 35% by 2050. The report also finds that on-farm profit could increase 20% with a shift to continuous living cover.

Winter camelina and pennycress were leading crops in the report, projected to be planted on over 5 million acres by 2050. Hunter estimated that currently, there are between 2,000-3,000 acres of the two crops growing in Minnesota.

He said that winter camelina and pennycress can both be harvested with traditional combines.

"But it does require quite a few adjustments," he said. "The seeds are really, really small, and that just means that farmers are going to have to make adjustments to their combines that they've never made before."

Farmers interested in growing either winter camelina or pennycress can reach out to Matt Leavitt, perennial grains and winter annuals agronomy specialist with Forever Green at leav0046@umn.edu