All about growing nutrient-rich camelina

If someone told you there was a crop that:

• doesn't need any pesticides or irrigation
• can thrive where other crops struggle
• copes with drought
• copes with frost
• is naturally resistant to flea beetle and has barely has any pod shatter (one for the farmers, sorry everyone else).
• AND naturally produces a delicious healthy oil.

...you'd think they were joking. But camelina really does all that. We think it's a no brainer.

Perhaps we shouldn't go on about how good it is as a crop on the internet. Surely anyone who can would start growing it would? You're probably right. But we think camelina is so good, and could do so much good for our environment and health, that more people growing and eating it can only be a good thing.

How we grow our camelina 

It's pretty simple. The seeds are sown on our farm in the spring. We check it and panic regularly, until late summer, when it has (hopefully) ripened in the sun. That's it. No sprays. No irrigation. And, this year, no nitrogen fertiliser. 

Once it is fully ripe, the combine harvester runs through to collect the crop. We sieve it all to remove any chaff that sneaks through. Then it's simply cold pressed to extract the oil. 

Cold pressing in this way (where extra heat isn't added and the temperature is kept low), means that the naturally occurring compounds the plant has worked so hard to make aren't altered or reduced in quality. 

But, growing camelina is new for us (we started in 2024), so we're trying different things to make it as environmentally friendly as possible. For starters we're trying to use as little applied nitrogen (fertiliser) as possible, and we're using seed saved on our farm so that hopefully over time we'll have a diverse strain that's well suited to our local conditions, and we're also trialling intercropping.

Intercropping

Most crops in the UK are grown as monocultures (only one type of plant is grown in a whole field, any typically only one variety of one plant). But if you look in nature monocultures very rarely happen (and if they do they are usually a sign something has gone wrong). Our soils don't do well with this way of farming, the microbes in the soil like and expect diverse plants to be growing above them and amongst them. Different plants produce different compounds from their roots which different microbes interact with. This then has a knock on impact on the wider soil food web. So, to avoid a monoculture, this year we trialled growing white clover, which is a perennial (lives for many years) legume (pea/bean family) as an understory beneath our camelina. Clover has the added advantage that it is nitrogen fixing (it has a relationship with specific bacteria that means it can use nitrogen from the air, not just the soil). The camelina was quite happy, as was the clover. So we'll have to see what happens when the next crop (wheat) goes in. 

Camelina with white clover underneath:

The farm beyond camelina

We're working on incorporating diverse herbal leys as extra wide water margins, planting new hedgerows (and gapping up existing ones), using cover crops (a mixture of plants sown between crops to improve the soil), and having as diverse a rotation of crops as possible. There's lots more we'd like to do, and lots more to learn.

Cover crop 2025:

Our dog, Kip, enjoying a herbal ley: