Agriculture This Week: Niche crop interest could return

It is interesting how certain random occurrences create thoughts of a much larger scale. 

For example, I was recently reading Gardener’s Notebook by Debbie Hayward, and she made reference to borage. 

While Hayward was referring to borage in terms of a garden, my mind jumped back several years to when there was talk in the farm sector in Saskatchewan that it could become an important niche crop since the plant is also commercially cultivated for borage seed oil extracted from its seeds.

Borage seed oil has one of the highest amounts of γ-linolenic acid (GLA) of seed oil, and in herbal medicine has a long list of applications.

The crop never quite achieved the level of production one might have expected from the ‘hype’ at the time, although to be fair there were a long list of crops that were thought to become important crops as the sector looked to diversify.