One of the things Shallan Dawson demonstrated time and again while she was at the Center for Justice is that she’s a creative problem-solver and a natural with people.
Shallan now works next door as it were, at Community-Minded Enterprises in the Saranac Building. But on a refreshingly cool day in late July we tagged along while she visited her extended office which, on this day, included a football field-sized plot of ground just off Highway 395 in the lower Chewelah Valley.
“Wow,” she said, as we came around a bend in the road, “check it out.”
A half mile away, amongst the barley and the alfalfa, was a rolling puff of gold, and a crop that, until now, has been missing from this part of the world: camelina.
The mere sight of the amply-blooming field told the story. The farmer who’d been persuaded to seed the test plot had deliberately not taken care of it since planting it in the early spring. And that, to Shallan and CME, was great news. A main purpose of the first stage of CME’s Community Biodiesel Project was to demonstrate that camelina could grow in eastern Washington, and grow without irrigation and cultivation practices that would increase the cost and fuel-use.
Despite the neglect, the camelina in the Chewelah Valley plot had done well, and was now in the late stages of giving up its yellowish blossoms to reveal pea-sized seed pods. Inside were the tiny seeds which, when crushed, produce oil for biodiesel and a meal that can be used as a soil amendment and feed for chickens and livestock.
“What we’re after involves a much different philosophy for biodiesel,” Shallan says. “The old method for biodiesel usually meant growing massive amounts of canola, which is a high input crop. You have to fertilize canola, you don’t have to water it, but it’s better for the yield if you do. And you have to spray for weeds. It’s a much more high maintenance crop than camelina, which has never been grown in northeastern Washington. These are the first crops.”
There is another key point to CME’s project, for which Shallan is the coordinator, and that is that CME wants to demonstrate that crops for biodiesel don’t have to compete with food and animal feed crops for land and water, but can be grown as either a rotation crop or on ground where the food crops would, at best, be more difficult and resource-intensive to grow.
“The thing is,” Shallan said, “we don’t want to compete at all. Camelina is a short-season crop, so you plant it in the spring as soon as you can get on the land. It germinates at 34 degrees and it can take cold frosts. It’s really hardy. And then it’s a hundred days until harvest, and the farmer can plant winter wheat here this fall, and now we haven’t competed with anything.”
There are some other known advantages to camelina, including the relatively high concentration of omega-3 fatty acids in the residual meal (which should translate into healthier animal products) and the fact that its oil, as a fuel stock, is viable for cold temperature use–something that cannot be said for palm oil and other biofuel oil sources in wide use around the world.
The other part of the project involves organizing the seed-to fuel-to market cycle, so that it becomes locally integrated in terms of supply, production, and demand.
The goal, she says, is that “the money stays in the community. We’re paying the farmers, we’re paying the processor and we’re purchasing the biodiesel locally, so the money we’ve just paid for this fuel is more likely to stay local. So, it’s helping communities stay sustainable while filling a small niche in their fuel needs.”
What excites Shallan the most is, not surprisingly, the relationship building she is getting to do bringing together growers, bio-fuel producers, and end users. Here her experience in working for the Spokane County Conservation District (before her job with the Center for Justice) paid off on her resumé. To learn more about the CME project, click here.
“I love this job,” she said. “It’s amazing.”
This year’s work was funded with a grant that CME obtained through the U.S. Department of Agriculture. To sustain the project, Shallan said, CME is looking to partner with area tribes and other groups to help use federal stimulus money to build sustainable, integrated systems. She and CME have put together a 38-page plan to guide them in reaching their goal.
But to get there, of course, she and CME first needed an answer to a basic question. How well could the stuff grow here, even if you weren’t trying very hard?
To illustrate the answer that question, Shallan pulled out a shovel and unearthed a nice core sample of camlina in its seed pod phase to take back to the Saranac. She was all smiles.
–Tim Connor
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