The U-S Food and Drug Administration recently gave approval to Agrisoma Biosciences to produce a new animal feed from carinata, which is mostly produced as an industrial oilseed.

Steve Fabijanski, President and CEO of Agrisoma, says there has been a push in recent years to expand the use of carinata and its export markets, and its approval for feed use in the U-S is a positive development.

"It's a pretty low fibre feed, very high protein, so it's very competitive with soybean and also it's non-GMO," he said. "One of the things the feed market is looking at, is for differentiated products around protein content as well as status with regards to generally modified."      

Fabijanski also spoke about the approval process. 

"We've already had the approval in Canada, but Canada and the U.S. have historically been very close so we wanted to make sure we had the approval in the U.S. which took a little longer, but we did get it and we're quite pleased with that," he said.    

Fabijanski adds they are conducting more demo trials of carinata in various parts of Western Canada, and are looking to have up to 75,000 seeded acres for the crop in the west by next year.