What Is Camelina Oil? A Guide to the Ancient Seed Now Grown in Montana

Most people have never heard of camelina. That’s not surprising — the plant’s American story is short, and its commercial story is shorter still. But camelina has been part of European agriculture since the Bronze Age, and the seed has had a quiet, persistent role in human nutrition for over two thousand years.

Lately it’s been finding its way onto American shelves — in cold-pressed cooking oils, in plant-based omega-3 supplements, and increasingly in research papers about cardiovascular health and seed oil chemistry. There’s a reason for the resurgence. There’s also a reason it’s being grown in Montana.

Here’s the story of the plant, and the place that turned out to fit it.

The plant itself

Camelina sativa — sometimes called gold-of-pleasure or false flax — is a small, wiry annual in the brassica family, distantly related to cabbage and mustard. It grows about two to three feet tall, produces clusters of pale yellow flowers in late summer, and finishes the season with seed pods full of tiny, copper-colored seeds. The seeds are roughly the size of a poppy seed but rounder, and they’re what the whole plant is grown for.

Each seed is approximately 35–40% oil by weight. Pressed gently — without heat or chemical solvents — those seeds yield a clear, golden oil with a mild grassy-nutty flavor and a nutritional profile that has caught the attention of food scientists, farmers, and supplement makers in roughly equal measure.

A short, useful history

Camelina has been cultivated in Europe since at least 4,000 BCE. Archaeologists have found camelina seeds in Bronze Age and Iron Age settlements across what’s now Germany, Poland, Scandinavia, and the Baltic states. Roman writers mentioned it. Medieval European farmers grew it as a reliable food crop and lamp oil source.

Then, slowly, camelina was pushed off the land. Industrial agriculture in the 19th and 20th centuries favored bigger-yielding oilseeds — rapeseed (which became canola), sunflower, soy. Camelina kept growing wild in field margins and disturbed soil, but as a commercial crop it nearly disappeared.

The renewed interest started in the late 20th century, when European researchers began publishing on camelina’s nutritional profile. They were finding something unusual: a plant oil with high omega-3 content, exceptional natural stability, and the ability to grow in cold, dry, marginal conditions where almost nothing else thrives. It was, in other words, an ideal crop — just one that had been forgotten.

What’s in the oil, scientifically

Cold-pressed camelina oil is roughly 38% omega-3 (in the form of alpha-linolenic acid, or ALA). That’s among the highest concentrations of any plant oil, comparable to flaxseed and meaningfully higher than most other culinary oils. It’s also notable for its naturally balanced ratio of omega 3, 6, and 9 — approximately 2:1:2.

That ratio matters. The Western diet has, over the last century, become heavily skewed toward omega-6 fatty acids — mostly from processed seed oils like soybean and corn. Researchers studying inflammatory and cardiovascular health have increasingly identified the omega 3:6 imbalance as a contributor to chronic disease, and the conversation around food has started shifting toward restoring the ratio rather than just adding more omega-3 on top of an already-imbalanced foundation.

Camelina is one of the few plants that delivers a balanced ratio in a single ingredient. Combined with high natural levels of vitamin E and antioxidants, the oil is unusually shelf-stable for an unrefined product — which is part of why it’s been able to survive cold European winters in clay pots for thousands of years.

Why Montana

Camelina is a hardy plant. It tolerates cold soil, short growing seasons, and rainfall variability that would destroy most commercial oilseeds. It needs about 90 to 100 days from planting to harvest, which is short enough to fit between the killing frosts of the northern Great Plains. It improves the soil it grows in, fixing nutrients and breaking up compacted ground. And it requires very little irrigation — sometimes none at all.

Northwestern Montana, it turns out, is one of the better places on earth to grow it.

The conditions are nearly identical to camelina’s native range in northern Europe: cold winters, dry summers, long days during the growing season, well-drained soil. Montana has the agricultural infrastructure of a serious farming state and the scale to grow camelina commercially without the high water demands or pesticide regimes that other oilseeds require.

The first commercial camelina trials in the United States were planted in Montana in the early 2000s. By 2006, the first dedicated cold-press camelina operations were running. Today, Montana is the center of the U.S. camelina industry — not because anyone marketed it there, but because the seed and the soil happened to fit each other.

Cold-pressed vs. expeller-pressed vs. solvent-extracted

If you’re shopping for camelina oil, the extraction method matters more than most labels make obvious.

Solvent-extracted oils — made by washing the seed with chemicals like hexane to dissolve out the oil, then evaporating the solvent — yield the most product per seed but strip away most of the natural antioxidants, vitamins, and flavor. Most industrial cooking oils on supermarket shelves are made this way.

Expeller-pressed oils use mechanical pressure but apply heat in the process, which can damage the omega-3 content and degrade the oil’s flavor and stability.

Cold-pressed oils use mechanical pressure without applied heat. The yield is lower. The process is slower. But the resulting oil keeps the natural antioxidants, the original flavor, the omega profile, and the color the plant produced. For an oil whose value is in its nutritional and chemical integrity, cold-pressing is the only method that delivers what the seed actually contains.

Where camelina goes from here

In the last few years, larger players in the agricultural and ingredient industries have started paying attention to camelina. Major food companies are exploring it as a culinary oil. Supplement manufacturers are using it in plant-based omega-3 products. Even biofuel companies have invested in camelina varieties bred for industrial use.

But the human nutrition story — the one Europeans understood for two thousand years — is still in early innings in the United States. The plant is genuinely remarkable, the science is solid, and the conditions in places like Montana make it possible to grow it the way it deserves to be grown: slowly, cleanly, and on land that suits it.

If you’ve never tried it, that’s the seed worth paying attention to.