Orepuki deer farmer's edible jute bale netting heads for a trial on King Charles' farms

The idea came to Grant Lightfoot while he sat in a decompression chamber at sea, a long way from his deer farm at Orepuki. Now a roll of the netting it led to is sitting with King Charles' farm manager in Britain, waiting to be tried on the royal farms this coming season.

Lightfoot is the man behind Kiwi Econet, a baleage netting woven from jute rather than plastic, which stock can safely eat. RNZ reported on Thursday that the netting will be trialled on the King's farms within the next year, after Lightfoot crossed paths with Prince William at Britain's Groundswell Festival. "He said that would be really good on our farms," Lightfoot told RNZ of the prince. He then got in touch with the King's farm manager and left the roll behind.

Why it matters for Southland farmers comes down to what happens to the old stuff. Big round bales of baleage are fed out over winter to deer, sheep, beef cattle and dairy cows, and the netting that holds them together has until now been plastic. "You can't recycle it, you can't do anything with it. Some farmers bury it, some burn it. It's a serious problem," Lightfoot said in an earlier interview with RNZ's Country Life. Animals have been known to swallow it, too. The outer plastic film on baleage and silage stays, but the net inside can now be something an animal is able to digest.

Before the netting, Lightfoot worked on an oil rig as a commercial diver. "The deepest I've been is 865 feet underwater and I've lived at that depth for 28 days," he told Country Life. His first plan was to use hemp, but rules in the United States around THC in livestock feed would have shut him out of that market, so he switched to jute. Back home, he and his partner, Colleen Quirk, knitted the first 50 metres of netting, 1.25 metres wide, by hand from jute twine, at about a metre a night. "Then we put it in the baler and it held together," he recalled. "I thought, wow, we're onto something here and the old goose bumps started."

The prototype won the open section of the Southern Rural Life Farm Innovation Awards, and a call from the United States soon after turned into a business partnership. The netting is now made commercially by a manufacturer in Kolkata, in rolls of 525m or 775m that slot straight into a baler. Lightfoot has told RNZ it costs a little under $4 to net a bale with Econet, against about $2.40 for plastic, yet he said farmers and contractors were already knocking on his door.

Since then the inventor has travelled around Europe, and RNZ reported earlier that his itinerary included a stall at Jeremy Clarkson's Diddly Squat Farm and the Royal Norfolk Show, where he hoped to talk to the royal family. Tariffs on Indian goods have complicated his plans for the American market, though he has said he is optimistic about getting in.

He hopes a royal trial will help carry Kiwi Econet around the world. As he put it to Country Life, the opportunity is there "because no one else is doing it. No one else in the world. Just little old Grant from Orepuki." The trial on the royal farms is due to run this coming season.