A workshop for farmers entitled “Possibilities of production and use of selected plant species for industrial purposes” conducted by BioWarmia Bioenergia i Biosurowce took place last 8th november at the Pomeranian Agricultural Advisory Center in Lubań, Branch in Stare Pole. The workshop was organized in the frame of PANACEA project promoting non-food crops (NFC) in Poland. More than seventy people from the Pomeranian and Warmian-Masurian voivodships attended the workshop. Participants were interested in crop production for industrial and energy purposes and agreed in developing special training materials on non-food-crops. The outstanding uses of biomass utilisation for non-food purposes were: pharmaceuticals, biofuels and bioenergy production. Farmers were able to appreciate the yield potential of cereals, rape, lupin, willow, hemp or lavender.
The mail lines of the meeting were focused on developing guidelines for species grown on poor soils and resistant to drought; increasing the market for NFC; the need of using residues for energy production; organic crop production; the need to reach smaller farmers in order to build farmers’ cooperatives in NFC production; lack of organization from product to consumer and weak coordination in NFC market; a chaos and lack of transfer of theory into practice; and the necessity of having a stable law and appropriate regulations for biomass producers, and not only for large companies.
