Has anyone tried producing their own cooking oil? While rendering lard or smaltz might seem easy, keeping enough pigs and chickens to do so just isn’t realistic on my small urban property. Is growing something like sunflower or rapeseed any more practical? There seem to be a few hand cranked presses on the market, but not much information on yields. What I’d like to find is something like, “Planted x square feet of sunflowers, got y-quarts of oil.” It isn’t warm enough here for nut crops or peanuts, so it seems like sunflowers or rapeseed is about it.
Not sure what the usable seed per flower yield is, but it takes about 2.5kg seeds to yield 1l oil. In English units, thats more than 5.5lbs of seeds to make a quart of oil.
1kg=2.204lbs
1l=1.056qt
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Any idea how kilos (or pounds) of seed I could yield per plant?
Seed yield is a function of several factors, including diameter of the flower head and seed size. You also need to factor in loss to insects as well as whether the seeds are usable. Sometimes there are seeds that don’t fill out, there fore, no usable oil. The best guess I think would be to take a sample of several flowers you’ve grown, cut out a wedge from each (say 1/5 the flower head) and count the seeds. From there you can sort the good seeds from the bad, determine an average yield and then figure out how many plants you can grow in your given area.
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I will add the yield is also affected by your particular climate and growing conditions. You can probably get good information from an agriculture or biology department from a university in your neck of the woods.
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Ok, I’ll admit you got me intrigued a bit. I’ve been googling this on my breaks. One study shows a yield of 1360lbs/acre, which would give you about 60 gallons. Here’s the link. If you read the pdf you’ll see its an involved process to get the yields they do, including but not limited to destroying the male plants and treating the females prior to harvesting.
http://coststudies.ucdavis.edu/files/sunflowersv2011.pdf
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I spent a little time on the sunflower growers association website and they thought that a yield of 1 ton per acre was possible. Given the UC Davis study, that might be not-so realistic. Using a more conservative 1000 pounds per acre yield, that would net 0.02 pounds per square foot. Unfortunately I don’t have enough space to make this viable. Even if I put in 125 square feet (a large part of my growing area) of sunflowers, I’d only end up with a bit under 6 pounds, which isn’t really enough for anything.
So, it looks like this isn’t viable of me right now.
I hear you. This little bit of studying the questions/answers has given me a better perspective of commercial agriculture and just how resource-intensive food production is. If you can yield 6 pounds in your plot it would be an interesting experiment to see if the juice really is worth the squeeze (pun not exactly intended). Also, I’m curious if you can possibly exceed expected yields through focused farming. I have been wondering how feasible a (mostly) self-sustaining small urban food plot would be. For example, using hens as food source, pest control and a perpetual fertilizer, coupled with vermiculture/composting to recapture unused nutrients (i.e., food scraps, egg shells) a person seriously dedicated to maintaing his plot could conceivably yield more food crop per area than a traditional back yard garden. Just how much time/energy that requires is the real question. Working for a living is demanding enough.
Our hens definitely do a lot around our place, especially as composters. Basic staples are hard to generate, though. Salt and fat and sugar are tough to make on your own without a large amount of land and without a lot of time. Our neighbors are in to bees, which helps our plants and eventually we’d like to start our own hives. We’re next to the ocean, so we may be able to manufacture salt eventually. But fat is a tough one.
Hogs in my mind would be a good source of fat. I have not studied farming at all but from what others have told me there’s not much hogs won’t eat. Pretty much every part of the pig is edible, if you are not restricted from eating them, that is. Goats and sheep are hardy, too. I don’t think they yield much fat, but both give milk.
As for salt, I think you could set up some sort of evaporative collector that could do double duty as water desalination. A basic solar still would provide fresh water, and the resulting brine could then be collected into a shallow evaporation tray. I’ve seen plans for low cost passive systems built from salvaged wood and windows designed to provide potable water that use down right nasty water as the source. These were for third world countries where raw materials, sanitation, power and tools are limited.
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Ok, I found something that demonstrates what I was talking about with a solar still. A few notes I would add about the design: there is an inlet for the contaminated water (in this case, seawater) but I would add a low point drain to collect any brine that is left. The concentrated brine will yield more salt per unit volume than regular seawater. Another detail that I did not see is some means of accumulating the condensate as it runs down the bass to the collector tube. Without some kind of bump on the low point of the glass, the condensate will run down the low side of the still. This could ruin the box after a while. A lot of the designs use a PEX pipe that is cut in half as the clean water trough. I would angle the pipe slightly so that the water drains completely. I would use the other half of the pipe as the accumulator. Just attach it to the lowest point of the glass so that the condensate will collect and drip into the clean water trough. A final note is try to make the still airtight as possible. If you have gaps a lot of the evaporate will leak out. The still will work, just not very well.
For making salt you can collect the brine and allow the water to evaporate. Ignore the goofballs on the question/answer sites like Yahoo that say harvesting se salt is a five year process. The five years is for commercial operations with brine pools that cover acres, and incorporate shrimp farms as part of the process. A shallow tray of seawater takes about two days to dry out in a 200F oven. In a situation where power/fuel are not available you can take pots, clean paint trays (the kind for roller brushes) etc and leave them in the sun. Darker colors are better since they absorb more energy. If you arrange these trays on some kind of thermal mass (stones, bricks, metal, etc) it will raise the temp and speed the process. I’m starting to wish I lived near the ocean so I could try this.
Wont work for the op situation but ive had very good luck with hogs. I find them easier to keep than fowl, hardy, can eat a variety of things that otherwise would be waste; kitchen waste, acorns, tomatoe vines etc. very low maintnance and with a nipple water system on a 55gallon barrel they can go days with just a quick check to make sure they dont break anything.
Lard is very easy to make and i usually do the day after butchering. Takes a few hours if doing alot but last a long time and really is a nice multipurpose ingregdiant. Great for use as a “cooking oil” in place of butter, in baking etc
Ive found them easier to keep than poultry only downside is poultry can be butchered as needed. In a “disaster situation” when you butcher a hog you need a way to keep 200lbs of meat at a time. Im experiementing with american guinea hogs as they mature at about 200lbs (vs 250lbs at 6 months for the tamworth and they just keep getting bigger) 100lbs of meat will be alot easier to deal with vs what im doing now. Last hog was 240 gutted and no head!
Ps for “terminal ballistics” reference a 22 short is plenty for a hog up to 400lbs. A 22lr hp tends to exit the head and can end up in the front shoulder even. The short seldom exits the head/brainstem and puts them down like a sack of bricks. Shot placement!