In the small Southern Ontario town of Port Colborne, three small fields on what locals call the "wrong side of the canal" may be rewriting the future of mining.

Over the past three years, Inco Ltd. of Toronto, in conjunction with Viridian Resources LLC of Houston, has been testing on those fields the proposition that alyssum -- a common ornamental plant that has naturally evolved an ability to absorb metals such as nickel and cobalt from soil -- can become an important part of metal extraction.

While the yellow flowering and bushy alyssums in Port Colborne sit on land whose nickel comes from a plume of pollution deposited by a former Inco base metal refinery, the two companies are in the final stages of negotiating a deal to partner what they hope will be a pure "phytomining" operation in Indonesia.

If all goes as planned, farmers on the island of Sulawesi will plant and harvest alyssum on land that is naturally rich in nickel.

Their metal-rich crop -- tests in Canada indicate it can contain up to 2-per-cent nickel -- will be taken to a furnace that Inco already has in place to process mined ore. There it will be burned and its heavily metallic ash -- previous tests suggest it may be up to 30-per-cent nickel -- will become a new kind of ore body.

Moreover, the fire created by the incineration of the alyssum, which can be gathered and baled like hay, could be used to generate power.

"A lot of people are skeptical because this is so new and they laugh when I talk about it, but many people who came up with new things have been laughed at before. I am not afraid of scorn," says Bruce Conard, Inco's vice-president of environmental and health sciences, who has been shepherding the company's effort.

So confident is Viridian of the viability of phytomining that it has staked claims on 13,000 nickel-rich acres in the western United States. It has planted test fields of alyssum on a few hundred acres and plans to commercially produce nickel from harvested plants next year.

Both companies' optimism is based on what seem to be quite astounding initial results from a technology initially developed by three universities and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

While the ability of alyssum to concentrate nickel and other metals was first reported in the 1940s, wild stocks have only a half, to a quarter, the nickel-ash content of varieties being planted in Port Colborne and the United States.

The dramatic difference is achieved, not by modern biotechnological genetic manipulation, but by breeding and selecting hundreds of naturally appearing alyssum varieties.

In addition, the two companies have been learning how to most efficiently mine nickel with a plant.

For example, they now know that the alyssum should be harvested before it goes to seed, because that is the moment it is richest in nickel. And because it is a perennial plant, the alfalfa-like alyssum will grow for at least three years in one place without diminishing nickel yields.

Yet another farming experiment included adding bacteria to the alyssum seeds. When the plants grow, the microbes help turn them into nickel accumulators extraordinaire.

University of Waterloo biologist Bernard Glick recently told a meeting at the university that his experiments in what is called "probiotics" were able to increase uptakes by twofold to sixfold.

Viridian spokesman Jay Nelkin says field tests show that as little as 0.05-per-cent nickel in the soil still allows the plants to arrive at a 2-per-cent concentration level.

"That is about one-20th the grade level a typical mining company would look for when seeking to open a mine," he points out.

In Indonesia, natural levels of 0.5-per-cent nickel in the soil are common. At that concentration Mr. Nelkin estimates that the top third of a metre would provide enough nickel for a 50- to 100-year mining operation. And because the soil goes down many metres, regular removal of upper levels of soil could see nickel farming going on for centuries.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has done an economic analysis of the potential yield for phytomining.

Assuming a price of $5,000 (U.S.) a tonne for nickel, a harvested crop would be worth $2,000 a hectare. This goes up to $3,000, if the burning energy could be captured.

This compares with an agricultural yield of $50 to $100 a hectare today on the same land, which is often marginal because the nickel in the soil stunts most plants.