3.3.1

Overview

Most people who think of agriculture paint a picture in their minds of endless fields of wheat, corn, or soybeans, and at harvest time big John Deere combiners with satellite systems traverse the fields and harvest large quantities of grain mechani­cally in no time. With Jatropha it is very different. Most of the time a Jatropha harvest is low-tech, taking place on marginal land that is very often mountainous or hilly, at the least. Consequently, the large majority of existing plantations in the world are harvested manually, like tea, rubber, or palm.

The advantages and risks of Jatropha are listed in Table 3.3.

3.3.2

Domestication

Today scientists know around 200 species of Jatropha. The species has not yet been fully “domesticated." Domestication is the process whereby through a process of

Table 3.3 Advantages and risks of jatropha

Risks and challenges

selection the Jatropha plant becomes accustomed to human provision and control. If you have a field of 1000 hectares of soybeans, all the plants have more or less the same characteristics and give more or less the same yield, and their common behavior is predictable. This is not the case yet with Jatropha, where yields are still unpredictable.

Plant domestication can lead to the production of food or valuable commodities. Good examples are cotton, silk, or rice. Plants domesticated for large-scale food or energy production are generally called crops. A distinction can be made between those domesticated plants that have been deliberately altered or selected for special desirable characteristics and those domesticated plants that are essentially no different from their wild counterparts.

3.3.3