Even in eastern Montana, where conservative ranchers and farmers might be expected to look askance at anything "green," biodiesel is a hot topic.
Organizers were stunned earlier this month when 150 people, most of them farmers and ranchers, turned out for a two-day workshop in Billings billed as a "field to fuel tank" look at making biodiesel.
But are biodiesel, and the prairie-grown oilseeds sometimes used to make it, viable commodities for Montana?
"They are going to be," said Al Kurki, manager of the Oilseeds for Fuel, Feed and the Future Project at the National Center for Appropriate Technology, the Butte-based research group that hosted the Billings workshop.
"Our knowledge has to catch up with everyone's enthusiasm about this," Kurki said.
NCAT has awarded grants to Montana farmers who are trying to grow and find uses for a variety of oilseeds, including camelina, canola, juncea and sunflower.
Innovators think the crops could serve dual purposes on eastern Montana farms and ranches - as ingredients for biodiesel and as high-protein feed for livestock.
But experiments in growing the crops and producing feed and fuel from their seeds are still young, and barriers, especially cost and federal regulations, stand in the way.
"We may not have the answers today," Kurki said. "But we're asking the right questions. We have time to get the right answers."
A little more than 335,000 gallons of biodiesel were pumped into Montana fuel tanks last year, according to Howard Haines, a manager at the Montana Department of Environmental Quality's Bioenergy Program.
Meanwhile, about 120,000 acres of the state's farmland were sewn with oilseed plants.
Oil squeezed from the plants' seeds can be used to brew biodiesel, a process of high interest to agricultural producers whose livelihoods depend in part on the hundreds or thousands of gallons of diesel they pour into their equipment every year.
"When I first starting working with biodiesel, we were trying to convince people to buy it at $2.20 a gallon when they could buy regular diesel for 85 cents a gallon," said Jon Van Gerpen, head of the Biological and Agricultural Engineering Department at the University of Idaho. "That was a hard sell."
Not anymore. Diesel prices have more than tripled in 10 years, and consumers have begun to wonder if today's high prices are the new standard.
That fear, combined with a newly acute awareness of the worldwide struggle over a finite supply of fossil fuels, will sustain consumer interest in alternatives, said Kurki, who also encountered skepticism a decade ago when he began researching renewable energy.
"We knew this day was coming, and here it is," he said.
Making biodiesel from oilseeds is labor-intensive, time-consuming and not necessarily economical, at least not on a small scale.
Individual farmers experimenting with the process using NCAT dollars have found some success but not enough to suggest that every ag producer in the state should invest in his own biodiesel operation.
But some of NCAT's guinea pigs think they have come up with a better idea - community-based operations.
Farmers and ranchers could trade in their harvested oilseeds for biodiesel at a centrally located plant, said Leonard Stone, a Geraldine farmer who planted his first camelina crop in 2005.
"The people would run it as a business, a local business," Stone said. "It would be really good for economic development."
Stone envisions two dozen such plants across the state, and other entrepreneurs have added a second piece to that vision - commercial feedlots.
Crushing oilseeds produces two products, oil and meal.
While the oil can be made into fuel for vehicles, the meal can be used as fuel for livestock.
Some Montana ranchers have reported that calves eating high-protein oilseed meal gain more weight than do calves that are fed traditional supplements, and they need less of it.
It would make sense to locate feedlots next to oilseed crushing plants, they say.
But the federal government has not approved some kinds of meal, including camelina meal, for livestock consumption.
The first-ever request for camelina approval was made only six months ago, according to Cort Jensen, an attorney with the state Department of Agriculture.
Despite the barriers, oilseed and biodiesel production appeals to Montana ranchers and farmers, many of whom like the idea of fuel independence.
"Everyone would like to auger in seed at one end and fuel up at the other end," said Getz, the Glendive hobby farmer. "It doesn't matter what you're politics are - anything we can do to reduce our dependence on foreign oil."
Getz, like most of the 150 people at the oilseed and biofuels workshop, has never grown an oilseed crop or fueled up his rigs with biodiesel.
But he wants to.
"Heck, I'd love to put in some," he said.
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