These days, we call it canola but back in the 1960s it was known as rape seed. And what is now a ubiquitous ingredient in food products was, back then, used as engine oil. Today, those bright yellow paddocks are a common sight in central New South Wales, north-western Victoria and, especially, in southern Western Australia.

Rape seed is produced by a plant from the cabbage family and was cultivated in India for its oil as early as 2000 BC. It later spread to China and Japan, where it was extensively used for oil lamps. Cultivation in Europe was sporadic and had all but ceased until the 1940s when developments in Canada sparked renewed interest in rape seed oil as a lubricant.

Early varieties of rape seed had chemical compounds, erucic acid and glucosinolates, that made the oil unsuitable as animal feed or for human consumption. Canadian researchers began using traditional plant-breeding techniques to reduce the levels of these compounds and the first “double low” oil was released in 1974. In 1979, it was re-named ‘canola’, a contraction of Canadian Oil Low Acid.

Rape seed was imported to Australia from Canada, with the first commercial crop in 1969, but the varieties were not ideal for local conditions and were high in erucic acid. The first local breeding program began in 1970 with several new varieties released over the following decade. An article in The Canberra Times in 1989 refers to the “newly-released” canola oil, suggesting that the domestic product took some time to reach the supermarket shelves.

Canola is now Australia’s third largest seed crop after wheat and barley and Australia is the second-largest exporter of the seed. Production in the 2023 financial year was more than 8 million tonnes.

In the first decade of this century, Canola was the centre of a controversy regarding genetically modified (GM) crops.  There have also been concerns raised about the nutritional quality of the oil, which is widely used in processed foods. This led to CSIRO research seeking to increase the proportion of Omega-3 fatty acids in the oil, as opposed to Omega-6.