Watched an interesting Newshub TV3 story about Ballance the other night. Too light on hard scientific questions, but well put together. Several statements by Ballance CEO Mark Wynne must be challenged: (1) Boucraa is an ‘ideal’ phosphate for NZ. Wrong; it is not effective for direct application and has to be attacked with concentrated … Read more
Ballance, with 45%+ of the NZ fertiliser market, sought an immediate injunction in the High Court in Sep 2018 to stop Quin Environmentals (QE) calling its Algerian RPR – an internationally acclaimed RPR to boot – an RPR. It failed. QE was just a start-up company simply trying to promote RPR as an environmentally-protective alternative … Read more
I am the first to admit that the ideas I am presenting in this blog go, in some areas, way beyond what I can claim to be my field of expertise. I have however done a search of existing scientific research in this area, and found nothing. So someone has to start the discussion. … Read more
Part 1 High P-using dairy farms in the Waikato and Taranaki have enriched soil cadmium (Cd) levels because of the decades-long use of high-Cd manufacturing phosphate rocks from Nauru and Christmas Island to make superphosphate. This shameful legacy is being ‘managed’ by MPI by restricting the Cd level in phosphate fertilisers that can be … Read more
Bert does the Overseer® Nutrient Management course at Massey I decided I would sit the Overseer® Nutrient Management course at Massey University a couple of months ago, just to make sure I was up to speed on the changes in the latest version. Both the P and N models are still ridiculously biased towards underestimating … Read more
What’s happening and what’s causing it? Global warming is happening. This is fact. The main reason is the rapid increase of carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide and methane in the atmosphere. These ‘greenhouse’ gases (GHGs) trap heat which would otherwise be lost from the planet. See the graph of CO2 increase since 1960! At least … Read more
Farmers have asked me what I think of SurePhos. Given the huge resources Ballance has at its disposal, and the pre-release hype, the specs of the product left me feeling underwhelmed; sad even. But one good thing; by advertising it as a fertiliser that has 75% less P runoff loss (relative to super in much … Read more