I’ve been following the Waikato Regional Council process on improving water quality & nutrient management which will lead to changes in how farming is carried out in the region. You can find earlier posts on this under the “Waikato” tag. You can link to the new round for ‘submissions on submissions’ from the image above.

I did make a submission (Mar17) focused on how Overseer could potentially impact the uptake of innovative solutions such as biochar but I completely failed to make any impact. A search on the 4-volume summary of submissions pulls ‘biochar’ once! Well done John Allen who was the only success.

It seems that the nascent biochar industry will need to gather much more momentum before anyone will take any notice. Pastoral agriculture is probably the hardest nut to crack due to broad-acre supply and cost issues so maybe we should focus on some sweet spots: animal bedding; AD; feed supplements; nutrient carriers; seed coatings; CHAB, …

So where to from here? If we had a functioning organisation, we could put together stronger submissions to these opportunities for marketing biochar potential and educating RC’s and industry.