On Sunday, September 12, 2004, at 04:45 PM, Appal Energy wrote:
Dave, Don't believe rapeseed meal has any edible characteristics for human ends. Livestock feed, yes.
Rapeseed has a high level of erucic acid and glucosinolates which make the meal unsuitable for many animals.
Sunflower meal would give the same oil yield and an edible meal, but not in a northern latitude.
Gee, sunflower grows great at 37 deg N. How far N. are we talkin?
Canola is just the trade name for rapeseed hybrid(s) that grow well at higher latitudes in the northern hemisphere.
Yes, canola is a number of hybrids with low erucic and low glucosinolate levels. However, they have a lot of "baggage" associated with them, in terms of the mega-agribusinesses that developed them -- for just two examples, almost no canola varieties are open-pollinated, meaning the farmer has to buy new seed every year; also, many varieties have been "engineered" (not necessarily through gene-splicing) to be Round-up Ready (meaning you can pile on the herbicide to kill your weeds without also killing your canola). Rapeseed, or good old mustard, is much "greener". -K _______________________________________________ Biofuel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://wwia.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/biofuel Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Biofuel archives at Infoarchive.net (searchable): http://infoarchive.net/sgroup/biofuel/
