SAEGERTOWN, Pa. -- It looks like a long-legged dandelion, smells like broccoli with a hint of hot-dog mustard, and it once lit Bronze Age oil lamps, before gaining favor in ancient Rome as a muscle balm.

A long-forgotten, Mediterranean-bred member of the mustard family, camelina might have purpose once again. On 300 acres in Crawford County camelina is being grown as a test crop in the manufacture of biodiesel.

Harvest time is here, though the jury's still out on what the crop will yield in oil and what the Lake Erie biofuel market will pay. But with a season's worth of growing pains just about behind them, a co-op of a dozen or so farmers guided by Penn State University agronomists remains upbeat.

"When we first looked at this, [vegetable] oil was 40 cents a pound," said project coordinator Joel Hunter. "Now it's 70 cents, so that changes the numbers a lot and works in our favor."

A PSU Cooperative Extension educator, Mr. Hunter hails camelina oil as an attractive biofuel source because the plant is low maintenance. Long ignored in North America as little more than a weed, camelina requires little fertilizer, no tilling and is spry enough to bat leadoff in an early-spring crop rotation.

Camelina also has an oil content that's roughly twice that of soybeans, a more popular biofuel resource. It also can be far cheaper to grow than either soybeans or canola, reports the Great Northern Growers Cooperative and other agronomists in Montana, the mother lode of camelina research.

More than 20,000 acres were planted there in 2006, one case study shows, with yields between 900 and 2,200 pounds per acre. With production costs in the $50- to $60-per-acre range, the break-even cost for camelina was less than a third of that for canola, according to the Minneapolis-based Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy.

Combined with the plant's superfast growth (85 to 100 days) and the high, Omega 3 fatty-oil content of its meal, local farmers are high on Camelina sativa's chances of becoming a prized crop for biofuel, lubricant and perhaps livestock feed.

Or as Mr. Hunter puts it for the agriculturally challenged, "We're gonna blow them out of the water with camelina."

In early July, with yellow petals beginning to show on stalks that were nearly 3 feet tall, co-op members gathered for a workshop to go over combine settings, small-seed complications and soil composition.

Mr. Hunter picked up one of his props, a 3-pound sack that held at least 1 million camelina seeds. The goal? Turn that bag into one acre of crop, which in turn could produce one barrel of oil -- plus plenty of meal by-product that could put a break-even proposition over the top.

Not that camelina is problem-free. The seeds are so tiny that they can be hard to broadcast. They easily can wind up where they're not wanted, making a mess of things. Then there's the high polyunsaturate content that can cause rapid spoiling.

But one of the most vital things to monitor, Mr. Hunter cautioned the farmers, was moisture content. Camelina may be great on the wallet or even sore biceps, but its oiliness can spell barn fire in a flash.

Safety guidelines call for camelina to be stored at no more than an eye-poppingly low 8 percent humidity. "That's one of the biggest things we're worried about," Mr. Hunter told the group, because "that's lower than anything we're used to."

For safe storage, 6 percent is the ideal, while "at 10 percent we start to worry about spontaneous combustion."

Jim Neuburger had little trouble imagining what a camelina-fueled wildfire might look like, given that the plant is 40 percent oil. But he did wonder why his camelina never came up the way Don Porter's did up the road.

"I decided not to keep the crop," he said, reverting in late May to his old standby of corn. Others suggested that he might've done better had he taken down more of his winter ground cover, or used a soil-drilling technique like Mr. Porter did.

The group toured a field that Mr. Porter had tended a half-mile away, 80 acres off state Route 198 that seemed the consensus prize winner. The camelina rose high and deep for as far as one could see.

"I didn't have a field that got growing in good condition, a really healthy harvest," Mr. Neuburger said, "so I came out to see what it was like here."

Not one to gloat, Mr. Porter, crop production manager for Ernst Conservation Seeds in Erie, said his company already had been dabbling in growing switch grass for bioengergy. Testing camelina was a natural spinoff.

"That's why we jumped right into it," he said. "We've got to find a place to get our oil from, so why not raise it on ground like this?"

The logic rang true to Mr. Neuburger who, despite his initial failure, was primed to give camelina another crack next spring. That's one of the beauties of camelina: its short, early season means the land can be reused with greater ease.

Mr. Neuburger cited another plus being Lake Erie Biofuels in Erie, which is anxious to buy whatever camelina oil the co-op can turn out.

Plant Manager Mike Noble said Lake Erie Biofuels, as one of the Northeast's leading biodiesel producers, can take a chance with camelina because of its extensive experience with soybean oil, which has a similar processing profile.

"We're trying to improve the product base for Pennsylvania farmers, and camelina seems to grow in harsh conditions," Mr. Noble said. "We had test results and everything hit the specs."

Also on hand was Crawford County Commissioner Jack Preston, who helped to pave the way for the county agreeing to let the co-op use some of its old dairy farm land.

"We just thought it was a great opportunity to diversify the possibilities that farmers can utilize as they look for new crops and ways to help their income level," Mr. Preston said.

Perhaps the plant that helped light the way in the Bronze Age (3500 to 1000 B.C.) will help fuel the biofuel movement -- and be a source of income for Pennsylvania farmers.