Israeli agritech company Casterra, a subsidiary of Evogene, has entered into a strategic partnership with Italy's Fantini Italia to advance the mechanization of commercial castor cultivation, aiming to strengthen the crop's role as a scalable and sustainable feedstock for biofuels and bio-based industrial products.
The collaboration combines Casterra's proprietary high-yield castor seed varieties and agronomic systems with Fantini's advanced mechanized solutions, including high-capacity harvesting and threshing technologies. The companies plan to develop integrated farming platforms tailored to various climates and production scales, addressing a key challenge in the modernization of castor farming: linking optimized plant genetics with efficient mechanization for industrial-scale output.
"Collaborating with Fantini represents true synergy," said Yoash Zohar, CEO of Casterra. "Their decades of expertise in agricultural machinery, combined with our elite castor varieties, enable a breakthrough in sustainable castor cultivation. This partnership will help position castor as a viable global feedstock for the biofuel and bio-based products sectors."
Nicola Bonacini, CEO of Fantini Italia, emphasized the alignment between the companies' sustainability goals: "Our current harvesting solutions already reduce carbon footprint by about two-thirds compared to conventional systems, and this collaboration will further enhance their efficiency."
