The Use of Pelargonic Acid Accelerates Seed-Drying of Camelina: An Example of Circularity of H-EU Project Carina

The European bioeconomy sector generates an annual turnover of around 2 trillion euros with more than 17 million of employes. Nevertheless, only part of the current biomass feedstocks used in Europe by the bioeconomy sector is domestically produced, thus technical and sustainable strategies for year-round supply of affordable and low-ILUC (Indirect Land Use Change) feedstocks are urgently needed to support the competitiveness of agricultural and bio-based sectors. Developing sustainable farming solutions for the provision of bio-based feedstocks would also help mitigating the risks of land abandonment, which is occurring at an alarming rate in Europe. Innovative double cropping systems including resilient and emerging intermediate crops would enable farmers to produce domestic and low-ILUC feedstocks replacing fallow periods of the year. The H-EU project CARINA (Carinata and camelina boosting the sustainable diversification in agricultural production systems) has identified two emerging oilseed crops, camelina (Camelina sativa) and carinata (Brassica carinata), as the most feasible options for integrating them in the current farming systems, as intermediate cash cover crops. CARINA aims at demonstrating the feasible introduction of carinata and camelina in different farming systems across Europe, and the full use of the produced biomass (seeds and crop residues) to source a vast portfolio of biobased products adopting a circular economy approach. Since camelina is characterized by a short growing cycle (Zanetti et al., 2021), it can easily fit as intermediate winter cash cover crop in southern European climates preceding typical spring/summer crops, such as sunflower, sorghum, corn and soybean. Furthermore, with a full circularity approach vegetable oils, derived from CARINA feedstocks, will be converted into pelargonic acid, by Novamont (CARINA’s partner), and then used to terminate camelina accelerating its maturity and thus allowing a more anticipate sowing of the succeeding crop, with indisputable benefits on the main crop productivity.