Can you believe it? Castor, which is common in the field, turned out to be a rarity and was listed as a strategic material by the United States. As a crop that can be planted everywhere, why can castor be loved so much?
What exactly is castor
Castor is an herbaceous plant that is both annual and perennial. It means that it blossoms and bears fruit in one year, or it blossoms and bears fruit in many years. Castor is a green fruit with a thorny appearance, like a small hedgehog covered with thorns. Unlike the "cang ear" similar to it, the castor fruit is not a seed, but three or four seeds, and it is much larger than the cang ear.
Castor from the tropics
Castor originally grew in Egypt and Ethiopia in Africa, as well as In India in Asia, all in the tropics. Castor, like the mainland, was imported from neighboring India. In the 1970s, the mainland vigorously developed castor seeds, and many post-70s generations remembered the slogan of "I am a four-way castor". How is castor living in the tropics grown on the mainland?
It turns out that castor is extremely adaptable to the environment, as long as the planting temperature is above 10 ° C, it can survive, so the castor you see when you are young is not grown in front of the house and behind the house. Not only has it been introduced in the mainland, but it has been widely introduced all over the world.
Castor is useful and poisonous
Why did the little castor get this favor? That's because castor "although small, but has a lot of effects; Not only is it useful, it's also full of treasure." The oil content of castor beans is about 60%, and the oil content is very high. Castor oil is widely used by pressing and refining, and the residue is also rich in nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, which can be used as a high-quality organic fertilizer. The rhizome of castor is also rich in fibers, which is a rare raw material for papermaking.
But useful is useful, but castor seeds contain two toxins, ricine protein and ricine. Ricine poison protein is more toxic, so accidental ingestion of castor beans is prone to poisoning, vomiting and respiratory failure leading to death. 7 mg of ricin can kill adults.
The "devil" who kills people is also the "angel" who saves people
Because of this property, the toxicity of castor is extracted into poison, which can be used in assassination operations to quietly kill people. For example, the famous "poisonous umbrella" assassination, in 1978, the Bulgarian writer Olki Markov, who was exiled in Britain, was stabbed with an umbrella on the road, but because the wound was so small, he did not care. Unexpectedly, he died of a high fever four days later, and later the doctor found residual ricin at the wound during an autopsy.
But like snake venom, venom can kill people for a moment, and it can also be used by humans as a cure. After research, it has been found that the castor poison protein of castor beans can kill some malignant tumor viruses, so it has become the preferred toxin for killing tumor cells, and is widely used in medicine for anti-cancer immunity.
Medicinal value of castor oil
However, an important prerequisite for becoming a strategic material is that the castor oil content in castor beans is very high, which can reach more than 60%. Castor oil produced by pressing is very versatile and has not only medicinal value, but also industrial value.
Bacteriostatic and skin-nourishing effect is large, and the back pain is still looking for it
In traditional medicine, castor oil is a good medicine for constipation because it has a good laxative effect.
In addition, because castor oil contains a large amount of ricinoleic acid, it can effectively inhibit bacteria and fungi. And castor oil has little irritation to the skin and can be used to treat dermatitis and various skin diseases. It has a very good effect on skin breakage and fungal infections.
We know that the eyes are very delicate, the eyes and the surrounding area of the drug needs special attention, and castor oil is also used for the treatment of eye inflammation because of its natural and gentle properties. Due to its good bacteriostatic properties, it can also be used as a hair care agent to prevent dandruff caused by fungi, etc.
Not only that, castor oil can also play a very good role in blood circulation, rubbing various parts with castor oil can play a role in relieving muscle pain and soothing joint pain. Many bruises contain castor oil in essential oils or medicinal liquors.
Oral castor oil requires caution
Castor oil is also very friendly to women, not only can be used to lubricate hair, moisturize the skin, but also can slow down the calmness of melanin, play a role in light spots whitening. However, for pregnant women, it should be noted that some remote mountainous areas may still retain the idea of scrambling eggs with castor oil, which can induce labor, but oral administration is not the same as external use. Coupled with the fact that it is not easy to grasp the dosage standard, it may cause strong contractions in pregnant women and thus bleed heavily, which is life-threatening. Therefore, the National Pharmacopoeia has clearly stipulated that castor oil is prohibited for pregnant women.
Although pregnant women need to be careful, castor oil has been widely used in modern medicine and pharmaceuticals and is an integral part of many drugs. For example, tributazole and saconazole are used to suppress bacteria and fungi, and tacrolimus and mountainine are used to suppress the immune system.
The industrial value of castor oil
But light is the role of medicine and daily life, and it is not enough to make castor a strategic material. So what are the criteria for becoming a strategic material? Let's take a look at what materials can be strategic.
Initially, only supplies used to make weapons were considered strategic. However, with the development of modern times, strategic materials are mainly ore raw materials, such as coal and oil. Rare metals needed to develop high-tech equipment such as aerospace, as well as agricultural products that are used in large quantities but rarely produced.
Castor oil has strong industrial characteristics
Castor oil is widely used in industrial production, and its importance is self-evident. Castor oil contains a large amount of castor oleic acid, and the viscosity is higher than that of ordinary oils, and the fluidity is good. It is used in various fields such as chemical textile, electromechanical, printing, dyeing and printing. As an important industrial oil, castor oil can be used to make surfactants, as well as as stabilizers and plasticizers for polymerization. Plastic foam and elastic rubber, which are common in daily life, need to be used.
Premium lubricants
In addition to being used in ordinary industrial production, castor oil is also used to produce high-grade lubricating oils due to its low freezing point. Castor oil does not freeze at temperatures of minus 10 degrees Celsius and does not denature at temperatures of 500 degrees Celsius. Even if it is exposed to air for a long time at room temperature, it will not deteriorate and become acidic due to oxidation reaction.
Therefore, the lubricating oil on the early aircraft was castor oil, but now it is more used in the manufacture of aerospace and high-precision instruments. There are also diesel engines, and castor oil is still used as lubricating oil on jet engines.
Castor oil replaces oil
Merely becoming a premium lubrication may not be the ultimate mission of castor oil. Countries are vigorously researching castor oil, hoping to use castor oil as an alternative to oil.
After research, it has been found that after the castor oil is hydrolyzed, the extracted material components can become derivative products that replace petroleum, such as diesel gasoline. But although castor oil can already replace oil in the experimental stage, it is still a long way from development to production to actual large-scale use.
If castor oil can successfully replace oil in the future, it will become a hot strategic resource. After all, the oil reserves used today are limited, and after extensive extraction, they are non-renewable. One day, we will have to find a renewable clean energy.
Although the new energy currently used has natural gas and electricity, it is neither clean nor environmentally friendly, nor is it difficult to regenerate. Natural gas, like oil, is gone and unsustainable. At present, electricity is more dependent on thermal power generation, and it is natural to pollute the environment without saying much.
But castor oil is a real clean energy, and biodiesel refined with castor is clean and environmentally friendly. According to the study, cars that use biodiesel burn very little exhaust and produce fewer toxic gases such as sulfur dioxide. 70% reduction in pollutants compared to ordinary diesel.
Therefore, the mainland is also stepping up the development of castor oil derivative products, and has been able to produce more than 30 kinds of derivative products such as the international No. 1 castor oil and industrial castor oil.
Production capacity of castor
The production capacity of castor is not high
Castor can be used as a strategic resource because although it is cultivated everywhere, its production capacity is limited.
According to the survey, the international market needs more than 10 million tons of castor beans every year, but the world's combined production is only about 2 million, which is far from enough. The mainland's annual demand for castor beans is also 800,000 tons, but the output is only 300,000 tons.
Didn't the mainland always grow castor, why not enough? Because only some parts of the mainland grow castor on a large scale, with the development of the economy, the demand for castor in all walks of life continues to grow, and it is naturally not enough. It has changed from self-sufficiency to relying on imports.
Originally, the castor produced in Brazil, India and other countries could supply the world's demand, but because Brazilian farmers abandoned the cultivation of castor from the 1990s to plant crops of higher economic value, but castor is not very versatile, and not enough, why is the price not high?
This is mainly because the useful part of castor is castor oil, and a certain processing process is required from castor seed to castor oil. As the most original raw material, the price is not much higher. So now the world mainly relies on India's exports.
Countermeasures for low production capacity
Since castor oil is used so widely, why not increase cultivation if it is not enough?
The first is because the attention of the whole society is not enough, and the degree of attention is not high. If you hadn't read this article, would you have thought that castor has so many uses? Fewer people know, and not many people naturally go back to plant.
Secondly, there are fewer enterprises engaged in castor oil processing in the mainland, and they have not been able to form a good industrial chain. SMEs can process less and less natural acquisitions. No one buys in large quantities, and even if castor is planted, it may face the problem of not being able to sell and not selling at a price, and farmers are naturally reluctant to plant in large areas. Instead, choose to plant more secure crops.
Another reason is that most of the castor currently grown on the mainland is a conventional variety, and the yield and oil content of castor beans are not as good as hybrid varieties.
But without large-scale cultivation and high-quality castor varieties, it is necessary to rely too much on imports, so it is easy to be subject to people. In view of this problem, the mainland is also actively laying out upstream and downstream enterprises in castor production, studying and cultivating hybrid castor seeds suitable for mainland cultivation, and I believe that this problem will be solved in the future.