Can This Unassuming Little Desert Shrub Really Save The World?

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While all this exploration of the jojoba's useful properties has been going on, equally valuableor, perhaps, even more important-work has been taking place with the cultivation of the shrub.

Pilot tests at the University of California at Riverside, for instance, have demonstrated that the jojoba can be trained up into a tree-like form when the young plant is wrapped with nylon mesh. This permits the ripening nuts to be caught in nets and/or harvested with mechanical pickers something like the equipment used in almond orchards. This, of course, very neatly does away with the need for the menial, laborintensive hand-gathering of the seeds that our culture finds so distasteful.

Experiments in Israel have also shown that the tenacious jojoba can grow and produce nuts in the hostile Negev Desert...even when irrigated only with lightly filtered and extremely salty Dead Sea water! Other pilot projects in the U.S. Southwest, northern Africa, and additional and sections of the world indicate that improved varieties of the plant can be bred which will produce several times the average five pounds of clean, dry seed that a wild female jojoba shrub bears annually.

The bottom line of all these experiments with the breeding and cultivation of jojoba on plantations already pencils in as a very optimistic conclusion: The shurb can not only [1] save the sperm whale, and [2] play a major role in keeping our industrialized society from starving and strangling itself and the planet to death ... it can also create a new and highly profitable way for the inhabitants of poor, hot, and countries [3] to reclaim "useless" deserts while [4] becoming self-supporting and [5] contributing an extremely valuable commodity to the markets of the world.

Start-up costs of a jojoba plantation are now estimated at from $1,500 to $3,000 an acre and maintenance expenses currently average about $100 per acre per year. That may sound like a sizable investment ... but the shrub begins to bear in only five years, improved and pruned varieties can yield from 1,000 to 2,000 pounds of oil per acre, and the plant will continue to bear for a minimum of 100 and as long as 200 years.

Furthermore, when you know that two of the refined substances (sperm oil and carnauba wax, both in increasingly short supply) which jojoba oil so efficiently replaces currently sell for 40c and $2.00 a pound, respectively, you begin to understand what a boon this plant can be. Especially when it grows so well on hot, and land that will support no other major crop ... with a minimum amount of irrigation, and no fertilizer at all.

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