Bathurst - The Centre of the Universe
Originally published on Plaastoe
Whilst visiting Mark Harris on his pineapple farm he takes me past a new bamboo project. He sold 500 hectares of his land to EcoPlanet Bamboo for the development of a bamboo plantation that focuses on providing a secure and certified source of fibre for timber manufacturing industries.
I make contact with Troy Wiseman, CEO of EcoPlanet Bamboo, in the USA to find out more. “We have 72% of the farm under bamboo and the other 28% of the farm has been set aside for biodiversity and conservation purposes.
“Our first operations were based in Nicaragua where we planted from native bamboo seed. Due to a unique and complicated flowering regime, access to bamboo seed is rare. In 2011 we wanted to prove that we could utilize tissue culture plantlets at commercial scale. These are not genetically modified, but just plants that are grown from the cells of parent plants in a laboratory.
