A New Zealand farmer and commercial diver who has invented an edible bale netting says he has been "overwhelmed" by the response to his product.
The mind behind the edible baling material called Kiwi Econet is Grant Lightfoot, a deer farmer and commercial diver from Orepuki, in New Zealand's South Island.
Kiwi Econet is a type of bale netting made from jute grown and manufactured in India. Jute is a long, rough, shiny bast fibre that can be spun into coarse, strong threads.
Mr Lightfoot came up with the idea while working as a commercial diver on an oil rig.
While in the decompression chamber, he often thought about his farm back home and improvements he would make — until one day, the lightbulb moment for the bale wrap struck.
“I spent months on end in decompression chambers. You get a lot of time to think in those chambers," he said.
“I was always thinking about how I could do something for the environment and make things easier for farmers."
While Kiwi Econet does not replace the outer plastic wrapping used for baleage and silage, it provides an alternative to plastic-based netting inside, which stock have been known to eat and in some cases die from.
"You can't recycle it, you can't do anything with it. Some farmers bury it, some burn it. It's a serious problem," Mr Lightfoot said of conventional plastic netting.
Grant Lightfoot runs a deer farm as well as Kiwi Econet. Pic: Supplied
Mr Lightfoot runs 100 acres for velveting stags in Orepuki and also grows crops for baleage, allowing him to test his product both for functionality and on stock.
Returning home from his time at sea, Mr Lightfoot and his partner, Colleen Quirk, hand-knitted the first 50 metres of the 1.25-metre-wide netting using jute twine.
“We had to hand-knit 50 metres of net to start with," he said.
“Once completed, knitting about a metre per night, we put it through a baler, and then it popped out, and we thought, wow, I'm onto something.”
However, on a commercial scale, developing the nets has taken about three or four years of trials and adjustments to reach the final product.
The prototype bale net won the open section of the Southern Rural Life Farm Innovation Awards last year, and the first two shipping containers—filled with hundreds of rolls— arrived at the end of last month in New Zealand.
The edible net wrap was designed to reduce the labour and expense of traditional wrap removal and disposal, streamlining feeding processes.
Independent testing by Eurofins New Zealand have confirmed the string is digestible, with a score of 395 grams per kilogram of organic dry matter. The results fell just short of desired plant nutrition digestion levels for foods, which range between 550–700 g/kg of dry matter.
Earlier this year, Radio New Zealand interviewed Mr Lightfoot about his prototype design—an event he believes “caused things to go gangbusters”.
“In the last week or 10 days after that interview, I’ve had millions of people like, share and follow me. I’ve had people from all over the world inquiring about the Econet," he said.
Mr Lightfoot said it was still too early to tell what the overseas interest would mean for the business, with the nets currently manufactured in Kolkata, India.
Regarding costs, Mr Lightfoot explained that as a natural product, Econet is unsurprisingly more expensive than plastic wrapping. Wrapping a bale of baleage in Econet will cost AU$3.65 compared to about AU$2.19 for plastic netting.
Econet is compatible with any round baler for baleage wrapping. However, due to the expanding nature of hay and straw when released from the baler, Mr Lightfoot said he is still doing some “fine-tuning” for the final product.
Mr Lightfoot is focused on distributing the product around New Zealand at the moment.
