A Saskatchewan crop has been sprayed on the greens of one of the most famous courses in golf, where players like Tiger Woods and Jack Nicklaus have shot some of their most memorable rounds.
The greens manager for Pebble Beach, a California course that has been home to four U.S. Open Championships, recently sampled a shipment of Greens Grade, a mustard-based nematode pesticide.
“His only question was where can he get more,” said Neil Wagner, co-owner of Peacock Industries, the company from Hague, Sask., that manufactures the biochemical.
Read Also
Vancouver port says it has improved efficiency
Grain movement has been strong at the Port of Vancouver due in part to a new centralized scheduling system.
The answer is nowhere because the product is awaiting regulatory approval from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. However, Wagner thinks the pesticide should receive its turf and ornamentals registration within the next two months.
Peacock and its partner Nematrol Inc., an Ontario company that provided the patented technology for the pesticide, have a deal to sell three million kilograms of Greens Grade over the next 21/2 years to a U.S. distributor.
That company has paid $750,000 US for the right to market the pesticide to golf courses across the United States. Peacock is keeping the home lawn market for itself.
The initial target will be Florida, a state with more than three million acres of lawns and 1,000 golf courses. Florida sales are “conservatively estimated” at $800 million by the 10th year of operation, Wagner said.
Nematodes are tiny worms, one thousand times smaller than earthworms, which pose major problems for turf, strawberry and tomato growers.
“You can’t even see them, they’re microscopic,” Wagner said. “You pull the plant out and feel the root and it’s greasy and slimy. Well, you just crushed a hundred billion nematodes.”
Every year they cause an estimated $78 billion of damage worldwide, while global sales of nematode control products are estimated at $3 billion.
According to a business plan prepared with Saskatchewan Agriculture, Peacock could be producing 360 million kg of its environmentally friendly nematicide within 10 years. Supplying raw material for that volume of product would require more than a three-fold increase in western Canadian mustard acreage.
Saskatchewan Mustard Development Commission executive director Roy Button was reluctant to comment on the acreage potential, but he likes the idea of creating new markets for mustard meal.
“I think it’s great to have companies looking at alternative uses for field crops that we produce in the province,” he said.”It has got potential for new markets and new processing and I think we’ve got to do a lot more work in that area.”
Peacock operates a small pilot plant in Hague that can produce 20,000 kg of pesticide a month. Planned improvements to the facility will allow the company to produce that in a day. If the plant gets to that stage, it will require 40,000 bushels of oriental mustard a month.
The plant uses a cold pressing technique to separate the oil and meal. Wagner said the meal is used to make a spicy pesticide that makes a nematode’s life “a living hell.”
There is an “extremely small” food market for hot mustard oil, the other byproduct of the process, but Wagner said there is much potential for using it as a raw ingredient in biodiesel.
University of Saskatchewan biodiesel researcher Martin Reaney said mustard oil has some nice properties, such as stability and lubricity, which make it an interesting biodiesel candidate. However, there isn’t enough mustard grown in the West to generate a reliable supply of oil.
“It will be a while before the oil content gets sufficient that you’d want to build a biodiesel plant around it.”
Wagner said if pesticide sales take off the way he expects, producers will be growing an additional two million acres of mustard in 10 years, which will provide enough oil to meet the needs of a biodiesel plant.
He envisions small, locally owned mustard processing plants across Saskatchewan, where 80 percent of Canada’s mustard is grown.
