One project that's attracted a lot of interest has been irrigating fibre crops including hemp with wastewater this is generically known as a North Coast mop crop project it's a collaborative venture to optimise effluent renovation. It's a partnership between Southern Cross University and Eco fibre industries LTD I might add that on the basis of our experiment here there are four local councils that are coming on board and we are going to be managing waste to develop mop crops for the north Coast. So rehashing effluent disposal is a major cause of declining water quality and the North Coast councils produce about 30 thousand million litres of effluent every year so we are quite major producers of effluent and this north coast mop crop is high collaborative it's bring together research party's, it's bringing together local council's, effluent producers, private industry to develop a new sustainable way of looking at resource water. So a mop crop is a crop that sequents it's nutrients and transpires water from effluent basically and there grown in sewerage farms. Nutrients are removed in the bio mass and then you take out the plant biomass there by removing nutrients from the system and then of course you have that useful biomass to use. An ideal mop crop will have a very high rate of growth it's going to accumulate a lot of nutrients in it's tissue and were going to be able to harvest all of the above ground bio mass very easily so it's going to be a great way of sucking those nutrients out. This project will develop an environmental economics model which allows council's to undertake cost analysis to determine the economics of mop crop. This dose not just look at the financial side, it considers the ecology to have costs and benefits. There is also going to be a lot of educational and scientific value that will be derived from this project. Basically the project is highly collaborative it evolves a lot of parties, were going to get cash inputs from the Australian research council and then were going to have a large-scale project including Leigh Davidson. We had an open day, we had about 50 people, representatives from local council's, local governments, people came from Queensland and around and the hemp embassy were represented there. The project outcomes the value of people to participate into this is we develop Mop Crop technology so we know it's limits, it's benefits, it's constraints, it's viability on the North Coast. We've got our environmental economics model which allows us to analyse the Mop Crops based on ecological sustainable development. It's going to off set all the costs of wastewater treatment if we can make money out of our waste rather than spending money on them then it's a lot more compatible. Of course there's a lot educational Scientifics, We anticipate that we will have 2 Phd students & up to 5 honours students working on this project, so there is a lot of research value and of course there is a lot of kudos for the councils that get involved in it, there not only putting out a green image there actually doing sustainable things. Just a little photo of what a mop crop looks like it's a highly agricultural project. We will irrigate it with effluent from an irrigating pump and a dripper system throughout and our monitoring hardware is flow activated auto samplers and multi probes, ground water measuring wells and suction lysimiters. Were going to be very rigorously monitoring these mop crops and were quite concerned as well, we know there are issues when we irrigate effluent in the water there are going to be issues when we irrigate it on the land, there's sodium, there's nutrients, there's toxic metals so all these things we are going to rigorously examine to see if it sustainable after to irrigate effluent on the ground, on the land and if so how much can we irrigate and what times of the year can we irrigate . So we will be answering some of these very fundamental questions.

So a lot of things go on in a mop crop system, the bio mass is accumulating the nutrients, your getting a lot of denitrofcation,amonialatalisation, loss of nutrients, a lot of cleaning goes on to the effluent as it goes through Mop Crop systems .We are going to look at the costs and benefits of mop cropping in the project and it will be a very powerful tool for councils to optimise there effluent renovation.

The other mop crop projects that we are working on under Southern cross university, there's one in Coffs Harbour, there irrigating bananas and bush tucker for effluent reuse, and in lot's of way they are leaders in the Mop Crop project as a lot of people have shied away from using food crops, they have embraced that and it will be very interesting to see how they go growing food crops. They are committed to doing some serious research on that to which we have just come on board. They have got some good equipment, They will be measuring the run off water from the plantation and the ground water as well and we will be looking at the quality of the effluent as it flows through the system, how much the trees can use, we've got quite a bit of hardware there to really monitor what's going on in the system.
Another project that were working on is with Alstonville sewerage treatment works, were going to be irrigating trees in pots in a nursery. We've got 10's of thousands of trees there the nursery uses 42 million litres of water from the local river every year and thy have decided that they want to be sustainable, stop using that stressed river water and use what's all ready there from the adjacent sewerage works. There also going to be using the sludge, the bio solids from the sewerage treatment works to incorporate in there potting mix. We get our sludge, we incorporate that in to the potting mix and we look at what happens to the nutrients in the system, it's all pretty basic stuff really and we've been doing it for thousands of years but we have pretty much forgotten how to make cycles, we've got such a linear approach, we've got to start a process and a finishing and trough it away. But this is about closing cycles sustain ably and elegantly. What are the important take home messages. There is no such thing as waste water, there is only resource water, The North Coast is an epicentre of sustainable effluent resource technology, we 're a leader in the field we're showing Australia and the World how to do it. Management orientated research is essential to achieve effective and sustainable outcomes in these systems so we really need to look properly at the systems and rigorously test how well they can be effective, otherwise we can just cause more problems for our selves if we don't know how much effluent to sustain ably put on.