The Southwestern Colorado Research Center in Yellow Jacket recently planted an acre of a promising perennial crop called silphium.
Native to the Great Plains of Kansas, it has interested researchers because of its potential as an oil seed crop.
It could ultimately make a product akin to sunflower oil, since “silphium is basically a perennialized sunflower,” said Katie Russell, the manager and research scientist at the Southwestern Colorado Research Center.
In Southwest Colorado, the plant holds potential to be an alternative forage crop.
“We have a very different environment here, compared to where they are in Kansas,” said Russell. “We’re looking at different elevations, different season lengths, different soil types. As you can imagine, there’s a lot of variability to each individual location.”
Despite the variability, reasons for interest in the plant are consistent.
“It tends to have bigger root mass, like all perennials, which enables a plant to die off in the winter and resprout in the spring,” said Betsy Trana, who started studying silphium about 10 years ago in Kansas with the Land Institute.
“It’s less expensive to leave the plant in place, and there’s less tillage, which is damaging to the soil,” Trana said.
Silphium is also able to survive with little water inputs compared with something like alfalfa, which makes it all the more attractive for areas with low precipitation, said Damián Ravetta, an Argentine researcher who studied a plot of silphium in Yellow Jacket this summer.
“We do have an area that is heavily reliant on alfalfa, and we know that is a high water use crop. So we’ve been looking at alternative forage crops that are using less water,” Russell said.
They’re not trying to completely replace alfalfa, just offer alternatives, Russell said.
Sainfoin and kernza are two other forage alternatives, which are a little farther along than silphium in terms of research and understanding.
Hunter Doyle, an agronomy specialist with the Land Institute, said they’re trying to prove that those three alternatives are more efficient in using water than something like alfalfa.
“Alfalfa is somewhat drought tolerant, but it depends on what kind of yield you want. It’s high quality, but you’ve got to put water on it,” Doyle said.
Where other plants use 22 inches or more of water, silphium takes 2 to 3 inches, Doyle said.
Ravetta remembered how one year, in Argentina, there was a long drought during the heat of the summer.
“Silphium stayed green and had good biomass, while soybeans and corn showed signs of stress,” Ravetta said.
And biomass is what you’re looking for in a forage crop, Trana said.
Think “larger leaf structure, slightly shorter stature,” Russell said.
Around Argentina, they’re growing silphium in four regions, Ravetta said.
Two are in Patagonia, one is on the Atlantic Coast, which has a lower elevation, and one in the Andes, which has a high elevation and no irrigation, so farmers there don’t water.
“They rely on the buildup of water in the soil and a few rains in spring before summer,” said Ravetta. “So farmers are looking for crops that can withstand low precipitation.”
One farmer in Buenos Aires already bails silphium regularly, and they’re working to establish another in the Andes, though conditions there are the most extreme of the three locations, Ravetta said.
Doyle said silphium is growing across Western Colorado – Yellow Jacket, Steamboat Springs, Kremmling, Grand Junction – and it survived in Kremmling, despite its elevation of 7,400 feet.
Though nobody is yet using it commercially stateside, Russell did say one local farmer bought sainfoin and kernza to feed their alpacas.
“Those are not as new, I guess, as silphium. To my knowledge, I don’t think that there’s any commercial production yet with silphium. I think it’s still at the research level,” Russell said.
The recent acre planted in Yellow Jacket, however, was direct-seeded with a planter, a method “more similar to what a farmer would do,” Russell said.
At present, “we don’t have a lot of knowledge on what recommendations we’d give to a farmer” interested in growing the plant, she said.
So in addition to recommendations, they’re hoping to get more seeds from this new plot to use in future research, Russell said.
Because beyond its forage potential, silphium is promising in other ways.
Though it’s “very much at its infancy,” there’s some understanding that silphium produces squalene, which is used in some skin and hair care products, Russell said.
Silphium also produces a grain, so there could be a grain production component too, she said.
And it can be home to local fauna, like birds and native pollinators, Ravetta said.
“They’re even working with honeybees because silphium has long, extended flowering,” said Ravetta. “Honey with a silphium component has a distinct flavor.”
“We’re really caught by the plant, it’s really amazing,” he added.
“Right now, we’re primarily interested in the forage value and the intercropping abilities because it is a perennial,” said Russell. “There are soil health benefits, there could be dual purpose behind it.”
Russell went on to say since it grows tall, it could be a “natural weed control by closing the canopy.”
Internationally, breeders are in the early stages of domesticating the wild plant, something they’re taking time with doing, Doyle said.
“It’s a walk before you run kind of thing,” said Doyle. “Domesticated crops lose traits that make them vigorous and better at defending themselves.”
For that reason, as the climate changes, people are looking to wild relatives of crops that might be more resilient to the changes and what those changes bring, like pests, Trana said.
“Right now, with silphium, we are actually really lucky. We’re outside of the range of most of the native pests for it, so that’s kind of another bonus,” Russell said.
In Kansas, researchers aren’t so lucky.
A Eucosma moth, a silphium-specific pest, popped up a few years into the breeding program there, since the plant is native to the area and was growing in large stands beside one another.
And so that’s why they’re breeding it slowly: “Wild silphium has a lot of defenses against pests,” Doyle said.
“The ultimate goal is that we can say with some confidence that, yes, this is a forage crop that will do well in x, y and z environments with these feed values, these protein levels, under these conditions and use less water,” said Russell.
“That’s really the impetus for the whole project, is trying to basically save water for the Colorado River,” she said.
