Woburn, Massachusetts, USA
October 28, 2020
Yield10 Bioscience, Inc. (Nasdaq:YTEN), an agricultural bioscience company, today announced that it has begun field testing to evaluate the emergence and agronomics of winter Camelina sativa varieties. The testing of these winter varieties in the 2020/2021 winter season is part of Yield10’s continued development of Camelina sativa in the medium term for use at commercial scale as a cash cover crop for North America.
Having previously evaluated the Camelina sativa winter varieties in 2019/2020, Yield10 continues to pursue commercial efforts to leverage its technology in the potential high growth cash cover crop market. Cover crops are becoming increasingly important to improve the sustainability of food production by improving soil health, reducing unwanted leaching of nutrients into the water supply, and enhancing economic returns for the farmer.
The objectives of the study are to determine the seed and oil yield potential of winter Camelina varieties, and to scale up certain plant lines to support conducting larger studies. The field tests will evaluate the best performing wild-type and doubled haploid lines from the 2019/2020 winter season. Doubled haploid Camelina lines are expected to have more uniform and stable performance, making them attractive as a foundation for Camelina development and insertion of Yield10’s performance and product traits.
“We were very pleased with the seedling emergence and overall crop performance of our wild-type and doubled haploid winter Camelina lines, which were tested under the extreme winter conditions encountered in Canada in the late 2019/2020 season,” said Kristi Snell, Ph.D., Chief Science Officer of Yield10 Bioscience. “We are testing our best performing winter lines this year at sites in the U.S. and in Canada to generate additional crop performance data in different geographic locations. This field test will enable us to evaluate the performance of the lines, as well as provide the opportunity to generate more seed to enable larger scale plantings in the future -- two key steps for demonstrating the seed and oil yield potential of the crop. We are building value in our germplasm foundation which will enable us to combine our proprietary traits in both winter and spring Camelina varieties, expanding acreage potential for the crop.”
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