Grow Jatropha: Polyculture Jatropha Plantation Growing In Haiti

This Jatropha Plantation growing in Haiti has nice healthy two year old Jatropha plants. This plantation is not mechanised in any way and you can see that the jatropha is being grown with beans and butternut squash. Growing Jatropha alongside food crops has many benefits in addition to providing food AND fuel security.

Monoculture Jatropha plantations are prone to diseases and provide no food security for the local people. Growing Jatropha for biofuel is not as important as growing food for the local community to eat!

Grow Jatropha: Making Fuel Briquettes From Jatropha Seed Cake

This video shows a press being used to make briquettes from the Jatropha seedcake which can be used as a solid fuel for cooking fires or as a fertilizer.

Burning Jatropha briquettes pressed from the Jatropha seed cake is a carbon neutral process because the jatropha has taken carbon out of the atmosphere whilst growing. Using jatropha briquettes like this reduces the need to cut down tree's helping with the problem of deforestation in rural areas due to the demand for vegetable charcoal.

Grow Jatropha: Extracting Crude Jatropha Oil With NF500 Oil Extractor

Jatropha is grown on plantations for bio fuel, after harvesting the jatropha a nut press is used to extract the crude jatropha oil from the physic nuts produced by the jatropha plants. Any simple worm gear press will be able to extract the crude jatropha oil from the jatropha nut.

Out of all the various machines that I have seen to mechanise the process of extraction of the oil used for bio fuel from the jatropha seed this is the best one!

However in rural Africa and other poorer parts of the world I feel a hand operated screw press is the cheaper and better option. Using the machine takes work away from the villagers!

 

Grow Jatropha: Filtering Crude Jatropha Oil For Use As Bio Fuel

The reason everyone is growing jatropha on plantations it to use the Crude Jatropha Oil as a bio fuel for cars and planes. Crude Jatropha Oil is a "Green Oil" which can be burnt in diesel engines after filtering. Here is a quick video showing how to filter the Crude Jatropa Oil.

Filtering the Jatropha oil to one micron (about the width of a human hair) means that it will pass through your oil filter without causing damadge (most oil filters are 50 microns).

 

Grow Jatropha: Jatropha Curacas Plantations In India - Funny Video

Promotional Video for Bulk Agro Jatropha Curacas Plantations in India

Well this is really funny! You have to go 2.05 minutes into the video before you even see any Jatropha plants! From the boardroom scenes you can see that the Bulk Agro Jatropha Plantation planogram shows a high percentage of small holder jatropha growers.

The nursery that is growing jatropha looks well organised and the jatropha appeats to be grown in rows in a very clinical way which projects Bulk Agro Pvt's corporate image as the promotional video continues you can see that they have some machinery for extracting the Jatropha seeds from the husks.

This looks like a well organised Jatropha Plantation from the promotional video however the jatropha plants shown are young and there is no intercropping on the plantation video.