GREEN TOWNSHIP, Ohio — The crop, unaffected by the drought, grows strikingly green in the middle of Wayne County.

It isn’t corn. It isn’t soybeans.

It is algae.

A sickly greenish hue dominates the water in four man-made ponds at Cedar Lane Farms, east of Wooster, where algae are being grown as part of a pilot project with West Virginia-based Touchstone Research Laboratory Ltd.

The goal is to grow enough algae to produce oils for renewable biofuels and other products. It is a new and potentially lucrative Ohio farm crop.

Other partners include the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory in Morgantown, W.Va., the Ohio Department of Development’s Coal Development Office, Ohio State University’s Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center, GZA GeoEnvionmental Inc. of Cincinnati and Texas-based OpenAlgae LLC.

The project has received nearly $6.8 million in a federal stimulus money. The state of Ohio and the partners have contributed nearly $1.7 million.

Touchstone Research recently hosted a coming-out party to celebrate the beginning of the project’s next phase: a demonstration-scale operation.

The company has moved “out of the nursery and into the toddler’s room,” said Philip Lane, Touchstone’s director of business development and the program manager.

The company is pleased by the progress and is intent on fine-tuning the system over the next 13 months, he said.

The project has moved from small-scale models to four plastic-lined ponds, each capable of holding 35,000 gallons of water and algae. A metal paddle wheel in each keeps the water circulating.

Two ponds are outdoors; two are in a greenhouse. Together they cover half an acre and can grow up to 1.2 tons of algae.

The algae initially grow in small batches in test tubes in the nursery at Cedar Lane Farms before developing enough to go into the ponds. The algae will be harvested several times a week when concentrations get high enough, Lane said.

Algae will be separated from the water, then the algae cells will be ruptured via a pulsing system to free the oil. Leftover material can be used as fertilizer or soil additives, although to date, nothing has been shipped from the farm.

Growing algae is not new. It’s been done for a long time, but few initiatives have been successful on a large scale, Lane said.

Algae are about 40 percent oil, or lipids, and 60 percent biomass, said OARDC researcher Yebo Li, who has been working on the project. He said an acre of algae can produce the same amount of oil as 10 acres of soybeans.