Potential investors contemplating farming jojoba should be cautious. Claims abound for the ease with which jojoba can be grown commercially, but jojoba requires a delay of about five years before it begins producing an income, and investing in the crop at this time appears to be suitable only for persons or organizations of substantial means. And investors should expect an economic risk for a long time.
Early jojoba growers, who rushed into planting without benefit of today's knowledge or experience to back up their management decisions, are likely to experience economic difficulties. Such situations occur with all farm crops; failure of imprudent ventures should not be viewed as an outright indictment of the long-term future of jojoba itself.
Actually, with almost any new crop comes failure and frustration, myths and misconceptions. (Avocados, kiwifruit, pecans, and pistachios all had turbulent beginnings in the United States, and yet all have become profitable, stable, national resources.) Patience and business acumen are essential. Interweaving plant science and business enterprise with market development is so complex that only a handful of farm crops have been successfully domesticated in modern times.
With potential industrial customers reluctant to estimate the quantity of jojoba oil they would consume, forecasts of market size must be based on tenuous assumptions of demand, supply, price, and any special technical benefits the oil might bring when compared with other oils. This means that, at present, there can be no foolproof projections of future price or demand.
Starting a Plantation
Jojoba is robust and adaptable, but it will not yield commercially significant amounts of oil just anywhere. It requires a congenial site: deep, well-drained soils, a hot, dry climate with little threat of frost, and preferably a reliable supply of water. Farmers should look for frost-free, low-lying, semiarid land. It should be fairly level if irrigated farming is to be practiced.
Jojoba development. Jojoba is now at a crossroads and its future course of development is uncertain. Its commercial testing time is still ahead.
Temperature. Before proceeding, growers should carefully investigate the area's climatic history to make sure the temperature rarely falls below 23°F ( - 5°C) for extended periods. With a permanent crop like this, a single severe frost every 10 years could doom a commercial endeavor or require expensive frost-protection devices. Mature plants can survive a medium frost (such as 25°F), but it kills their flower buds so that no crop results that growing season.
To judge a site's suitability, local weather data detailing lowest temperatures in previous decades should, if possible, be obtained. Even this may not be enough to determine specific local conditions because variations can occur within a few miles of where the data were recorded. Rolling terrain is especially tricky because on frosty nights pockets of cold air can form in low sites.
Rainfall. Although native stands of jojoba grow where rainfall can drop to as low as 4 inches (100 mm) a year, the plant needs more than that for profitable production in commercial plantations. A mature plantation, for example, probably needs at least 18-22 inches (460560 mm) of water a year to be commercially viable, at least in industrialized countries.
Sex Determination. At present, it is not possible to determine whether a seedling is male or female until it flowers. This makes it difficult to position the male plants in a plantation. The problem can be circumvented by planting and then "roguing out" the unwanted males (and inferior females) once they bloom. Using cuttings or tissue culture to vegetatively propagate plants of a known sex allows the grower to avoid this problem entirely.
Plant Selection. Genetically, jojoba is extremely diverse. It displays variations in branching patterns, leaf size, earliness of flowering, number of fruits per node, fruiting pattern, and male to female ratios. This diversity results in large variations between individual plants in the time they take to mature, their seed yield, and their adaptability to a given site. This adds enormously to the complexities the grower must master to achieve commercial success.
From 1978 until 1983 most plantations were established using seed, and because of their inherent diversity, more than two-thirds of the yield may come from fewer than one-third of the female plants.
Such variability, however, also provides opportunities to select and breed for optimal characteristics. It is vital to find and replicate quality specimens - planting them will result in plantations that yield more rapidly and several times higher than has been possible heretofore.
It is a widespread myth that jojoba needs no management. Like other crops, it requires skill and care to ensure a financial return. Weed control and fertilization, for example, can significantly influence yield and profitability. Of five 4-year-old Israeli plots using identical seed but different management techniques, one produced 1,350 kg of seed per hectare, another 1,050 kg per hectare, and three averaged only 162 kg per hectare.
There is also a misconception that jojoba doesn't need irrigation. That assertion may be true for survival, but, in most cases, not for maximum production.
Because the crop is so new, definite projections cannot be made about yields of fully mature plantations. One factor complicating yield projections is the consistency of bearing. Jojoba is not inherently an alternate-bearing crop, but some plants do bear prolifically one year and bear almost nothing the next; others are much more consistent.
The reasons for this need to be clarified, and ways to overcome inconsistency translated into management practices.
Plantation spacing is another complication in yield projections. Although a density of 900-1,000 female plants per acre (2,200-2,500 per hectare) seems to be a good target, some growers aim for twice that many, preferring to remove the less desirable plants later as they become identifiable. (This is an uncertain process because the low, early yielders may be the high bearers in the long run. And the bushes can get so intertwined that removing one without damaging another is almost impossible.) Other growers aim for only 500 plants per acre (1,240 per hectare) and may interplant other crops between the young bushes to provide income during the early years.
By and large, researchers don't agree on likely yields in commercial plantations. Three of their different projections are listed below:
· Conservative. University of Arizona researchers project yields of 0.5 pounds (200 g) of seed per plant (without roguing or selection) at age 5 years, and 1 pound (0.5 kg) of seed per plant at age 10. This is based on the average yield of the various plants in their germplasm collection at Mesa, Arizona.
· Moderate. University of California researchers believe that 3-4 pounds (1.3-1.8 kg) of seed from seedling-derived plants 7-8 years old is within reach. And they believe that by planting cuttings taken from the best plants available, 4-5 pounds (1.8-2.3 kg) of seed per plant seems realistic.
· Optimistic. In a university experimental plot in California, some trees have yielded 7 pounds (2.6 kg) per plant each year from their eighth year onward. Although this provides hope for especially good yields in the future, it is generally observed that yields in farm fields are not as abundant as those in university experimental plots.
At present, a yield of 200 pounds per acre (200 kg per hectare) from 4- to 5-year-old shrubs and of 3,000 pounds of seed per acre (3,000 kg per hectare) from an 11- to 12-year-old plantation appears to be a realistic expectation from well-managed, carefully selected plants. But no plantations are yet old enough to actually produce this amount - the average yield worldwide is 0.7 pounds (300 g) per plant in the fourth year.
As better plants are selected and vegetatively propagated, dramatic increases in yield and decreases in maturing time will occur. Already, in Israel, 3.5-year-old superior plants, propagated by tissue culture, have yielded an average of 3 pounds (1.2 kg) per plant. (The high was 1.5 kg and the low was 0.4 kg per plant.) Also in Israel, a 2-hectare plot near Mohav yielded 3.3 pounds (1.5 kg) per plant in the fourth year.
The existing jojoba-processing facilities in the United States have a capacity to produce 1.6 million pounds (0.7 million kg) of oil per year, but they actually run at only about 20 percent capacity because of the limited amount of seed available from the native crop and from the young plantations. These factories, running at a fraction of their actual capacity, extract the oil at a price of 50-75 cents per pound of oil ($1.10-$1.65 per kg). This high cost currently adds a commercial uncertainty, but, at maximum production (which should be achieved in the next few years), these facilities should be able to routinely extract the oil at a cost of 8-12 cents per pound (18-26 cents per kg).(Information from C. Whittaker)
Plantings Outside North America
With a crop so new, commercial viability outside the plant's native habitat still needs to be proved. Trial plots are encouraged, but, for the time being, massive plantings of jojoba outside the Sonoran Desert are not recommended. Although there is little doubt that jojoba will survive in Africa and the Middle East and other similar climates, there is as yet no certainty that the crop will set enough seed to be commercially profitable.
Orange Roughy Oil. The orange roughy, a fish recently discovered in the deep waters off the coast of New Zealand, produces an oil of the wax-ester type. Fillets of this fish have become a popular delicacy in New Zealand and increasingly in Japan and North America.
Orange roughy oil is being commercially extracted from the waste material left after filleting the meat (Fish oils extracted from two other South Pacific deepwater species' the black oreo and the small-spired oreo, also contain this type of oil). Made up predominantly of C-36, C-38, and C-40 wax esters, it is contaminated with up to 5 percent triglycerides, as well as saturated and unsaturated fatty acids and fatty alcohols ranging from C-14 to C-24. Perhaps because of the free acids, the raw oil is unusually corrosive, causing rubber and polymeric seals to decay; this has delayed its introduction into commerce.
Reportedly, an estimated 2,500 tons of orange roughy oil could be produced annually from the catch allocated by the New Zealand government's fishing laws. By comparison, the amount of jojoba now in cultivation today should produce 10 times that amount when the plantations reach maturity.
Jojoba is generally of longer chain length than this fish oil, it has no triglycerides, and requires no deodorization or "preservation" prior to use.
"Synthetic Jojoba." During the past two years, as jojoba oil prices rose because of increased demand and a poor harvest from the native crop, several chemical companies have produced "jojoba substitutes." One company in West Germany already makes a jojoba-like liquid wax out of high-erucic rapeseed oil and sells about two tons of it a week. Some physical characteristics (such as color and odor, infrared absorption patterns, and viscosities) of these so-called jojoba substitutes are similar to those of pure jojoba oil, but little information has yet been published that compares their range of functional properties with those of jojoba oil itself.
In experiments, jojoba substitutes have been made from the oils of plants such as crambe, limnanthus (meadowfoam), lunaria, and rapeseed. Like other vegetable oils, these are triglyceride oils, but their fatty acids have about the same carbon chain length as those in jojoba. To transform them into the substitute takes three chemical transformations: the oils are hydrolyzed and their fatty acids chemically separated from the glycerol, half the fatty acids are reduced to alcohols, and the resulting alcohols are esterified with the remaining half of the acids to form the wax ester.
Such a process currently produces a cheaper product than jojoba oil. But when the full jojoba crop comes on stream, it seems likely that the cost advantage will be reversed.
Compared with these competitors, jojoba has two major technical advantages: high natural purity and a single double bond in each of its acid and alcohol portions. Most other vegetable oils have a greater amount of unsaturation, and when chemically transformed into derivatives (for lubricants, factices, and other industrial products), the extra double bonds lead to tars and gums that are detrimental in many uses.
Biotechnology. Plant scientists have found that tissue from immature jojoba seeds (2 months after pollination) can be artificially cultured. As the cells of these "test-tube embryos" multiply, they produce an oil identical to that in jojoba seeds. It is thought that such tissues might be cultured en masse, thus bypassing the plant and generating jojoba oil in a factory. At present, though, this process cannot compete economically with jojoba oil flowing from plantations.
In future it may be possible to put jojoba genes in bacteria and produce jojoba oil by fermentation. This possibility also seems far distant because five or six genes are involved in producing the oil, and it would take a lifetime of painstaking research to get them transferred and activated in a microorganism.(Information from C. W. Lee)