BILLINGS -- David Sands is ready for an agricultural revolution.

He has a crop so diverse you can wash your face with it, spread it on bread and eat it, heat your house with it, feed cows with it, turn it into plastic, even fuel your truck with it.

The only thing it won't do -- this crop that Sands, a Montana State University scientist, is so excited about -- is plant itself.

At MSU, researchers keep creating new ways to use camelina, an iron-age crop with great potential that somehow fell through the cracks of agriculture evolution.

Montana scientists resurrected the seed a couple years ago as gas crept toward $3 a gallon.

It won the endorsement of Gov. Brian Schweitzer, who raved about its potential to put Montana on the biofuels map. Playing on the oilseed's feminine name, he was soon telling people he was crazy for this gal camelina.

Now, scientists like Sands say there's much more than fuel to this cousin of the mustard seed. And if they could lure farmers away from the freakishly high profits of wheat, they'd prove it in the ground.

"We think this could be big for Montana," Sands said. "You know, the governor called camelina his girlfriend. Well, we're going to take her and turn her into a real Cinderella."

The optimism surrounding camelina in the lab is the mirror opposite of in-field camelina pessimism.

On the farm, the talk is mostly about the surest bet, the crop that's selling high this spring, this fall and into the future. A farmer getting $13 a bushel for his 2009 wheat isn't going to plant an experimental crop selling on contract for $9 a bushel.

But in the artificially lit, climate-controlled vaults of the Plant BioScience Building in Bozeman, optimism easily germinates.

The grass outside is a dirty spring brown and puddles still freeze in the shade, but inside, in 94-degree heat and 72 percent relative humidity, students are growing kudzu, the green-vined plague of the South. They've somehow convinced the plant to starve itself to death.

A few doors down, students are shooting grain with a DNA gun, essentially blasting new characteristics into its genetic structure. Lying on research counters are bags of flour ground from prehistoric grains that pose no danger to victims of celiac disease, an intestinal disorder that makes it impossible to eat everything from pasta and fries to soy sauce.

Rest assured, if someone ever extracts blood from a turnip, it will happen in a lab like this.

The wonder supplement

Camelina is a shooting star here. Feed it to chickens and you get heart-healthy eggs. Stir it into peanut butter and, in theory, children have what they need to better focus in class.

Some scientists are calling camelina a wonder-supplement because of the omega 3 fatty acids in its oil.

Omega 3s are the good fats that lower cholesterol, prevent excessive blood clotting and may reduce coronary heart disease risk. They're considered essential to the human body, but they're also a fat the body cannot make.

In mice, omega 3s supplements have improved the mental function of Parkinson's sufferers.

And last year, the Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics reported that children with behavioral problems showed improved learning ability on an omega-3-supplemented diet.

"I want it in the school lunch program," Sands said. "Imagine. Kids get omega 3s in their lunch. Now they can go back to class and sit still. Now they can learn."

Flax, oily fish and walnuts are primary market sources for omega 3 currently, but entrepreneurs like Bob Fritz believes newcomer camelina has an edge over the frontrunners.

Fritz's Benicia-Calif., company, Animal Naturals, sells Omega Dog, an omega 3 oil supplement made completely from camelina grown in Montana. The product is sold exclusively at Petco, where a 31-ounce bottle costs $24.99. Roughly $10 of that price is paid to the grower.

With those kinds of profits, Fritz questions the wisdom of filling a diesel truck with camelina.

He expects to launch a camelina supplement line for human consumption within the year.

"When I first talked to growers up there, they were telling me about biodiesel and I said, 'Listen, you're missing the picture. Using this as biodiesel is like using a race car for a doorstop. It's ridiculous,' " Fritz said. "Its real value is nutrition. This is an elegant solution to our omega 3 needs."

The mainstream sources for omega 3 oil both have problems, Fritz said. Much of the fish oil relied upon for omega 3 comes from salmon, which are increasingly testing positive for contaminants such as mercury and wildfire retardant. Coupled with contamination concerns are worries that salmon are being over-fished.

Flax oil, also called linseed oil, has been an extremely popular omega 3 alternative to fish oil, Fritz said. But flax oil spoils quickly.

Fritz correlates flax's problems with spoilage to where it's grown. The seed plant does not fare well in harsh climates where its cellular structure quickly deteriorates.

Out in the cold

Plants that do thrive in harsh environments tend to have built-in resistance to cellular breakdown, which usually translates into better shelf life, as well.

Camelina, drought-resistant and ready to grow in the cold, is one of those plants. The cold weather also seems to improve its vitamin E content, which is a big selling point in health markets.

"The fact that it lives in a tough neighborhood benefits us," said Fritz said.

There's evidence in the climate-controlled vaults at MSU that camelina could outperform wheat as a made-for-Montana crop. The seed plant grows thick and green at 38 degrees, an indication according to researchers that camelina can be planted in Montana as early as January.

The crop would lay dormant until early spring and then reach its thirsty young adulthood right about the time spring rains arrive in May or June. The crop would be harvested in July, allowing growers to go into some of the driest months of the year without needing to irrigate.

"The biggest advantage that camelina has is that it will grow when the ground is still cold," said Gary Iverson, who farms camelina near Sunburst. "It's growing in the ground at about 38 degrees where most crops won't grow until it's 44 degrees."

Iverson got into camelina about three years ago at the urging of MSU. The university was looking for a group of farmers willing to grow experimental crops coming out of the bioscience program.

The lure to the program initially was high-protein oats, but after a year Iverson and a couple dozen other growers agreed to grow a few hundred acres each of camelina. In 2004, they formed Great Northern Growers Cooperative so they could work as a group with MSU scientists.

The partnership has gone well. Great Northern is constructing a mill to roll oats in Belgrade and setting aside some space in the facility for bottling camelina oil. Initially, the cooperative's interest in camelina was rooted in biodiesel.

Fuel prices were just beginning to hit $3 a gallon and plant fuel was all the buzz. Politicians in farm states were looking for ways to put acres into fuel productions and in state's like Montana where corn ethanol wasn't a serious option, green diesel from oil seed plants like canola and safflower took center stage.

But growers quickly concluded that fuel tanks weren't the best place for "the governor's girlfriend." Great Northern is focusing on natural supplement and cosmetic markets. They're the oil-seed farmers behind Omega Dog. And it turns out that cosmetic companies like L'Oreal and Estee Lauder have been using camelina in anti-wrinkle products.

Fueling the future

Other camelina advocates in state are developing camelina as a fuel oil. Great Plains-The Camelina Co. in Bigfork promises to create a camelina biofuel industry in Montana. Great Plains is partnered with European-based INEOS Enterprises, one of the largest biodiesel producers in the world. Great Plains announced earlier that it would spend $20 million this year constructing a seed crusher and biodiesel refinery. A site for those facilities hasn't been determined.

Targeted Growth, a Seattle biofuel company, announced last November that it will create a research and development center in Bozeman with Green Earth Fuels of Houston. Their corporate offspring will be known as Sustainable Oils.

Sustainable Oils' goal is to produce 100 million gallons of camelina-based biodiesel by 2010.

However, there hasn't been a rush among farmers to plant camelina and that has prompted attempts to sweeten the pot. Earlier this year, the Montana Department of Labor and Industry, through its agro-energy program, offered to reimburse the seed costs of farmers planting camelina for the first time.

At a time when camelina seed was selling for 10 cents a pound, the state offered to cover costs up to $1.30 a pound for a minimum of 10 acres planted at seeding rates of three to five pounds an acre. Thirty-two counties in northern and Eastern Montana were targeted. Wheat profits were thought to be keeping farmers from trying camelina.

To better compete with grain prices, Great Plains in February offered camelina growers $9 a bushel for their crop. That's roughly twice what the seed sold for last year.

A couple million acres of camelina would have to be planted to meet the long-term goals of state biofuel companies. Acres like that are going to be hard to get at a time when even the camelina true believers of Great Northern are opting for grain.

"There were about 23,000 acres planted last year," Iverson said. "This year, because of the price of wheat, a lot of growers are saying, 'Yeah, I'm going to plant wheat this year.' "

The future will have to wait.