"Pennycress as an oilseed cash cover crop for food, feed, and biofuel production" - John Sedbrook

Lightning Talk: Developing pennycress as an oilseed cash cover crop for food, feed, and biofuel production
By John Sedbrook, Professor of Genetics, School of Biological Sciences, Illinois State University, Director of the DOE Integrated Pennycress Resilience Project (IPReP)

Pennycress (Thlaspi arvense; field pennycress) is under development as a winter annual oilseed bioenergy crop for the 80 million-acre U.S. Midwest Corn Belt and other temperate regions. Pennycress is a Brassica with a diploid genome, closely related to rapeseed canola, carinata, camelina, and Arabidopsis, and having unique attributes such as extreme cold tolerance and rapid spring growth. Off-season integration of domesticated pennycress varieties into existing corn and soybean acres would extend the growing season on established croplands, avoid displacement of food crops, provide ecosystem benefits including reduced fertilizer runoff and soil erosion, and yield up to 3 billion gallons of seed oil and 20 million metric tons of protein-rich seed meal annually. This lightning talk will provide an overview of how pennycress is being rapidly developed into the cash crop named Covercress, with the goal of an initial commercial planting on 50,000 acres in the fall of 2022.
***
As part of the National Science Foundation-sponsored Convergence Accelerator Conference for Food Security in Extreme Environments and Food Deserts on 19-21 May 2021, participants submitted lightning talks exploring emerging solutions that can be applied to sustainable food systems in extreme environments and/or ongoing efforts by researchers, industry, foundations, and government agencies in this area. These talks have not been screened or edited by the organizers, and conference organizers, sponsors, and partners do not endorse nor take responsibility for the contents of the videos. For more information about the Conference, visit www.convergentfoodsystems.org.