The Farmers Weekly otherwise fair article on the High Court judgment was unfortunately ruined by the inclusion of Anders Crofoot’s ill-informed and irrelevant comments. Why didn’t the chairperson of the Fertiliser Quality Council (FQC) bother to read up on what the case was actually about; perhaps even make contact with me to see if the FQC could help sort it out, as I had suggested in my letter to Mark Wynne (CEO Ballance) two years ago!
I have never had any objection to the existence of Fermark. However, I believed that the continued use by Fertmark of a totally unsatisfactory test for RPR, one that is used nowhere else in the world because of its shortcomings, should not go unchallenged.
To describe the Fertmark 30-minute citsol test as more ‘stringent’ than other solubility tests for RPRs used around the world is totally misleading; laughable in fact. It gives false negatives and false positives. RPRs containing even small amounts of lime or dolomite – like Algerian RPR- give a false negative. Even worse, you can mix Sechura RPR – which has an artificially high citsol test but high cadmium – with any non-RPR waste or other phosphate and pass the test. This was done for 6 years! The FQC did nothing. Why, Anders?