Green Oil Podcast

Click on the icon to hear an interview with the Principal behind our Australian green oil plantation, Neville Burman.

Neville Burman

Neville Burman has been involved in Agriculture and Horticulture for over 30 years and is an internationally recognized consultant in agronomy. He has helped develop commercial plantations in many countries around the world and has a particular interest in the application of new technology for the improvement of soil fertility and genetics. Neville is a member of the International Society for Horticultural Science and a Founding Patron of Australia’s James Cook University.

Starting off in the family sugar cane plantation business Neville gained a considerable amount of hands on experience in agronomy and agriculture before attending University, with the intention of entering the banking profession. However, upon leaving University his interest and attraction to agriculture was so strong that he continued to follow his passion and subsequently he also expanded into Dairy and Beef cattle farming.

By using his previous experience gained form the Sugar Cane plantations Neville was able to develop cutting edge techniques that enabled him to grow crops that were treble the yields from neighbouring farms. In addition to this he had a strong interest in collecting plants, particularly rare species plants and propagating them through tissue culture labs he had established in Asia.

In the early 90’s Neville was involved in the discovery of Landscape Palm in Australia and began to establish commercial plantations in order to grow and distribute the seeds to the tropical world.

Neville was subsequently approached by the Vanilla industry to use the Jatropha tree as a host tree. At the same time through his interest in landscape palm he bought into a seed garden business to produce hybrid oil palm seed in Asia.

Having used tried and tested horticultural methods that have also increased yields in growing Apples, Olive Trees and Coffee plantations, Neville’s interest in the production of oil for food and bio-fuel crops continued to grow. Neville then looked at work previously done on Millettia trees in India for over 1,000 years and also conducted various plantation experiments in South/Central America / Africa Asia.

Neville began to utilise Millettia Pinnata, which could be used to produce bio-fuel. With the discovery and refinement of specialist growing methods and the genetics of superior crops, he was able to obtain higher yields than any other crop in the bio-fuel industry.

These latest methods and technology, combined with Millettia variety that is four times as productive as those being grown in India, combined with many years of agricultural experience is the basis for establishing the commercial Green Oil Plantations in Australia.

His motivation is to produce superior plant genetics combining with best technology to achieve highest economic yields.