By Ariel Grossman, NoCamels -
An Israeli company has developed genetically engineered versions of the ancient castor bean – and their higher yields and higher oil content are helping nations power their vehicles with greener fuel.
The castor bean – which despite looking like a bean is actually a seed from the Spurge family of flowering plants – has been used as a medicine for thousands of years, with evidence of ancient Egyptians even using it as a laxative.
Today it has many uses, including biodiesel, a blend of fuel usually made from vegetable oils or animal fats and regular diesel, which can help ease the strain on the environment by lowering the overall greenhouse gas emissions of automobiles.
Casterra engineers special varieties of castor beans that consistently produce higher yields and grow more densely, “meaning that from any hectare that you grow, you can squeeze in more yields, and generate more income,” CEO Eyal Ronen tells NoCamels.
The company’s modified seeds can produce castor beans within four months, compared with the unadapted version grown on farms, which Ronen says takes six to eight months. This means that farms growing Casterra’s engineered seeds can produce yields three times a year.
Its castor plants, which grow up to 1.4 meters (4.5ft) in height, produce 2,500 to 3,000 kg (over 6,500 lbs) of seeds per hectare. Other varieties on the market, says Casterra, grow up to three meters (nearly 10ft) in height, and produce 500 to 700 kg (just over 1,500 lbs) of seeds per hectare – making for a lower yield that takes up much more space.
And the company says that its seeds hold more oil, with a 50-percent content, while other varieties have a 30-40 percent content.
Ronen says it was a long process to create the cultivar. It started with its seed bank, which he explains is a library of 300 different varieties of the castor bean plant collected from over 40 countries.
“This gives us the capability to create all kinds of combinations, for example between one variety that was taken from Costa Rica and another variety that was taken from India,” he explains.
Better Beans
Creating a new variety of a plant normally takes a decade, because it needs to be bred over and over again to ensure that it exhibits the desired properties with each generation.
Casterra was able to cut the process in half by using the technology of its parent company Evogene, an Israeli biotechnology firm that develops new products for human health and agriculture.
Its predictive biology platform sequences the genomes of plants so that it can determine its characteristics without needing to wait for the sample to reach maturity.
Beyond developing genetically engineered seeds, Casterra also sells specially developed equipment that addresses problems in the castor bean supply chain.
The Rehovot-based firm provides its solutions to oil and gas companies that Ronen says knew little of cultivation and agriculture, which is why they have expanded to providing protocols of cultivation practices and its machines to those companies.
It mainly sells its seeds and supplies its services to countries in Latin America, including Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay, and now, several locations in Africa.
Casterra is just one example of the many companies that make up Israel’s advanced agri-tech sector. Other companies that are using their tech knowhow to increase agricultural yields include CarobWay, which uses precision technologies to enhance carob growth and fruitfulness; BetterSeeds, which modifies the DNA of cowpea to make it suitable for mechanized harvesting and large scale cultivation; and Saffron-Tech, which uses vertical-farming methods to grow saffron indoors and increase its cultivation to four harvests a year.
A Changing Market
The global castor oil market size was valued at $1.21 billion, according to the most recent statistics reported in 2021.
While India is the biggest grower of castor bean oil, it mostly produces the plant for soaps, lubricants, and coatings.
But Brazil, which was expected to produce 43,700 metric tons of castor oil in the 2021/2022 crop year – up nearly 60 percent on the previous year (27,400 metric tons) – primarily cultivates it for biodiesel purposes. The major companies that produce biodiesel from castor oil, says Ronen, are also based in Latin America.
“I think the fact that we are an Israeli company, and castor is not being cultivated on a commercial scale in Israel, gives us an advantage,” says Ronen. He believes that its location opens up market opportunities in different areas for Casterra, as major castor biodiesel firms are tied down to their regional markets in Latin America and cannot expand on the same scale.
Indeed, Israel has always innovated for the global community. Casterra, which has been selling its genetically engineered castor beans to farms in South America for the last several years, has just announced that it secured two orders worth a total of $11.3 million to provide its seeds for biodiesel production in countries in Africa.
Countless other agri-tech companies expanded their innovation abroad, like Edete, which uses mechanical pollination to help Californian almond and pistachio growers; SeeTree, which helps the world’s largest orange farm in Brazil track the health and productivity of its trees using its intelligence platform; and Tevel, which has developed the world’s only flying autonomous robots that are now picking fruit in Chile.
The biodiesel market was worth an estimated $40.6 billion in 2021, and is expected to reach $52.7 billion by 2027. This corresponds with news on various countries rolling out new biodiesel regulations in their efforts to combat climate change.
In 2018, European Union negotiators agreed to completely phase out the use of palm oil in transport fuels from 2030.
The most commonly used sources of biodiesel are soybean, palm, and rapeseed oil. But growing these crops for biodiesel and other uses has led to deforestation. Not to mention that these crops compete intensively with food production over already limited resources of land and water.
Castor beans, on the other hand, can be cultivated on lands with poor soil quality or water supply that cannot support other crops. The plant is so resilient that it has even been found growing in landfills, on roadsides, and along railway tracks.
In addition the new EU deal, the US Environmental Protection Agency in June adopted new mandates for biodiesel by reducing reliance on foreign sources of oil.
“All of this will generate an immediate increase in demand for castor, because out of the different sources that exist today – like sunflower, canola and others – castor is the best crop,” concludes Ronen.
