Election 2020: Green Party leader James Shaw backs innovative Manawatu businesses
Greens leader James Shaw visits BioLumic with the party’s Palmerston North candidate Teanau Tuiono and BioLumic chief science officer Jason Wargent.
Sustainable business schemes operating in Manawatū are just what the Green Party says the post-coronavirus economic recovery needs.
Green Party leader James Shaw toured Etech, The Factory and BioLumic in Palmerston North for a look at sustainable businesses making global waves on Monday.
“They are really putting into practice the high-value sustainable economy of the future that the Green Party keeps banging on about,” he said.
The Greens policy for economic recovery has a strong focus on sustainable businesses.
Shaw said it was important to highlight the innovation bubbling away throughout the country and to showcase the potential of sustainable business. It would be these kinds of innovations that carried the agricultural and manufacturing sectors into the future.
“They underpin the brand that this is grown in the cleanest soil, and the greenest water and the cleanest air in the world, and you can trust that because it comes from New Zealand.
“It’s exciting to see the potential.”
BioLumic uses “clean growth technology” to grow agricultural crops such as lettuce, soybeans, strawberries and tomatoes, and medicinal cannabis.
BioLumic chief science officer and Massey professor Jason Wargent treated plants with ultraviolet lights, which led to better crop yields and protecting them from disease without the use of chemicals or genetic modification.
He said businesses like his fed the local eco-system, with companies taking on student-interns and bringing people into the region.
“It’s a great opportunity to show some of the really exciting agriculture technology in Manawatū, and in Palmerston North, with potentially world changing tech.
“I don’t think people know about it. All these innocuous buildings.”
The company has been working on strawberry plants for three years, with a 47 per cent increase in yield in the plant in that time.
The Factory, a business that helps entrepreneurs with skills, contacts and funding, helped BioLumic get off the ground in 2013 and now had more than 20 staff and a lab in California.
-Rachel Moore - STUFF