Selfsufficientish.com

Oil seed rape..........grows like mad in the UK, and produces oil which you can eat, or burn in a diesel engine!
For either use, all you need is a simple press and filter.
Someone asked us how much they'd have to grow to be self-sufficient in power for a small house - we reckoned around 6 acres of rape or ten of sunflowers!

Google "oil extractor" and you'll find some sellers (raw food sites often have them).

They are about £70.

But yes, it does take a LOT of seeds.

Wouldn't it require quite a lot of sunflowers to get out some oil? I'm not so familiar yet with selfsufficient living, but I think that you would need a whole bunch of sunflowers to get enough oil out of them. :)

You'd need somewhere in the region of 10-12 large olive trees to be self-sufficient in oil (and soap, detergent, etc..) for a year. The tricky bit in the UK is finding a mill, but then I suspect that applies to rape and sunflowers as well.

For olives you can extract using a fruit press, and skim the oil from the water as it separates. You can expect approx 20% of the oil in the olive using this technique, so you'd need maybe 60 large trees instead. On the other hand, you can buy an olive press, which will yield somewhere near 80% of the oil, but would use a huge amount of electricity to do so. That's why, if you go to France, Spain, Greece or Italy, most small producers take their olives to a commercial mill to get pressed. I know a few producers with their own mills, but they have in excess of 5,000 trees each.

Rape requires significantly more pressure to release it's oil, nearly double that of olives, and the pulp needs to be heated beforehand and requires significant refining afterwards. The only rape mills I've seen are owned by large agri concerns, but the situation may have changed in the last couple of years.

I've just tried googling oil extractor and can't find anything other than those for vehicle oil. I'd be interested in seeing something for GBP 70 that can assert 1,400 bar of pressure.

contadino wrote:The only rape mills I've seen are owned by large agri concerns, but the situation may have changed in the last couple of years.

There are a couple of small producers in the UK now. I assume they have their own mills.


http://www.farrington-oils.co.uk/
http://www.borderfields.co.uk/oleifera/index.php


There may be more - these are the tow I'm aware of.

I can't see anything on either of their websites about offering mill services - as in you turn up with your rape crop, wait an hour or two, then walk away with your oil.

Also, how big are those farms?

contadino wrote:I can't see anything on either of their websites about offering mill services - as in you turn up with your rape crop, wait an hour or two, then walk away with your oil.

No, that's right - I don't think they offer that service. But then it would be unusual at least if anybody grew a few acres of OSR in the UK for private use, so I think these services would not be in demand! Although I don't have any data on that, but I think growing olives for your own oil needs a lot less land than growing OSR, so would make a bit more sense.

I just mentioned those companies to point out that it's not all huge agribusinesses in oil production.