Room for Improvement
MODERNIZATION MACHINERY
Conventional agricultural machinery has gone through a long trajectory of improvement and modernisation. This allows farmers to operate efficiently on a large scale. Specially adapted machines for paludiculture have not yet undergone such a long process of optimization and modernisation. This leaves a lot of room for improvement. Machines need to be able to operate on a larger scale, increasing the width of their harvesting equipment for example. More digitalisations can also highly increase productivity and cost effectiveness. Sophisticated gps-systems, allowing machines to automatically choose an efficient trajectory avoiding puddles and other obstacles, need to be developed. Modernisation of the machinery will also minimize pollution by leakage of for example motor oil, this is especially important in nature management where pollution should be avoided at all costs.
LOGISTIC CHAIN
Paludiculture biomass has a very low density, making it expensive to transport since it cannot be loaded in large quantities on trucks or boats. This increases the importance of a local production chain from farm to final product. Simple drying halls (see showcases), and small factories that can process biomass into construction boards and other products should ideally be owned collectively by multiple farmers and be built close to the paludiculture fields.
To avoid high rewetting costs, the focus should be on fields that have a nearby source of water that can passively flood the designated area. This not only removes the costs associated with pumping water into the field, but it also alleviates pressure from the pumps that originally kept the fields dry.
SUBSIDIES
Setting up a brand-new production chain requires money for certification and is associated with a certain level of uncertainty. In both these cases, public funding can provide a solution. The investment to acquire certification for a product, such as biobased building materials derived from cattail, is often too high for a single company. To stimulate the market for biobased building materials, national or international governments could take up some of these certification costs.
These same governments could provide more certainty for the whole production chain by guaranteeing purchase of building materials for large building projects. Another way to create more certainty is by creating environmental requirements for building projects for housing and infrastructure. In these requirements, a minimum use of biobased building materials could be incorporated which would greatly increase the development of the market for paludiculture products.
REGULATORY FRAMEWORK
A regulatory framework that allows for easy and profitable rewetting and paludiculture needs to be developed. Paludicrops need to be recognized as agricultural crops to make paludiculture eligible for agricultural funding.
Further existing agricultural funding (i.e. European agricultural funding) needs to be applied to paludiculture and used to incentivise rewetting of peatlands and counterproductive subsidies that maintain the status quo should be stopped.