NSW jojoba farmers turn crop with disastrous past into golden opportunity in skincare market

Jojoba has come a long way in Australia since the 1980s.  (ABC News: ABC Landline)

Australia failed to grow jojoba in the 80s but 40 years on, the nation's largest grower is experiencing booming demand from skincare users.

The clear golden liquid extracted from the seeds of jojoba contrasts with the dusty job of harvesting the desert shrub.

"Jojoba is a no-brainer," said Vicki Engsall, who co-founded The Jojoba Company with her father Ian Turner in Yenda, in the New South Wales Riverina district.

She said jojoba seeds contained wax ester, rather than an oil.

"It matches our own natural skin and it carries everything into the skin," she said.

Ms Engsall said the company had been founded by coincidence.

She had used an imported jojoba product during her pregnancy, but had no idea her father was growing the seed until he mentioned it at a family dinner.

"He goes, 'I don't know what to do with it'," Ms Engsall said.

"I said, 'You need to bottle it up, it's very hard to buy. There's hardly any Australian jojoba around'."

The bottled product struggled to get off the ground in the early days when most people didn't know what jojoba was.

"It was really hard, we were really stomping the footpath and trying to create demand for jojoba," Ms Engsall said.

"When we first started, 'natural' wasn't really a thing ... we had that struggle and then we were really lucky because after five years 'natural' became the thing.

"We grow double digits every single year."

Replacement for sperm whale oil

Initial attempts in the 1980s to launch an Australian jojoba industry were an epic failure.

The oil-like wax from jojoba was hyped as a lucrative replacement for sperm whale oil, used in cosmetics and lubricants, when whaling was banned in the 80s.

But the plants weren't ready to be commercialised and farmers didn't know how to manage them, which led to huge losses for those who invested.

But Mr Turner was one of about 20 farmers prepared to give jojoba a second chance.

"His philosophy in the whole of life is, 'If nobody else is doing it then I'll do it because there's an opportunity'," Ms Engsall said.

What started as a 30 hectare block is now nearing 100 hectares of jojoba shrubs, with this year's harvest the biggest.

The entire harvest goes into the company's skincare range.

The business grew out of renewed plant breeding efforts in the 90s, when scientists from the CSIRO and the New South Wales Department of Agriculture developed a handful of varieties that suited Australian conditions.

From there, they began convincing growers to give jojoba another chance.

Retired plant breeder Peter Milthorpe helped develop the Australian varieties.

He said seeing The Jojoba Company take his work into the mainstream was a satisfying result.

"It's very important ... it's been the thing we've been looking for," he said.

How is it grown?

Farm manager Tavis Kleinsasser said there was now no doubting jojoba was lucrative.

"At the current market, it's worth anywhere between $10,000 to $13,000 a tonne for the seed," he said.

"If jojoba farming is done correctly, it has the potential to pretty much beat out any other crop."

Most of the plants are the female or wadi-wadi variety, which produces the seeds.

Only 3 per cent of the trees are the male or dadi-dadi variety, which pollinates the females.

While the plants and management techniques have come a long way since the disastrous 80s, jojoba requires a large initial investment and is a tricky crop to get right.

Only 30 per cent of wadi-wadi plants propagated at the Yenda farm survived.

Mr Kleinsasser said it took seven years to get a decent crop.

They also had to install huge fans to reduce the impact of frost.

"In some of our worst frost years we were losing around 80 per cent, so it can be quite significant," he said.

Mr Kleinsasser said with so few growers in Australia, breeding newer varieties was now left to producers, which was challenging and exciting.

"We look at the comparison of a wolf to a poodle … wheat is like the poodle, it's been bred for hundreds … thousands of years," he said.

"Jojoba's a wolf — it's only one or two generations removed from its wild relative.

"There's potential to find some really amazing varieties out there."