On Thu, 12 Aug 2021 20:23:07 +1200, I wrote:
... NZ farmers have been using a piece of software to help them estimate their environmental groundwater impact that, according to some reports, is giving wildly inaccurate results ...
Just found this report <https://www.stuff.co.nz/environment/climate-news/125907504/major-tool-for-managing-farm-pollution-gets-a-fail-from-reviewers> (linked from this <https://www.stuff.co.nz/environment/climate-news/126133351/why-the-overseer-farm-model-is-faulty> opinion piece) on an independent review of the Overseer software. Seems it has gradually been co-opted into becoming a compulsory regulatory tool, a role well outside its original design parameters. A review of it was done way back in 2018, led by Parliamentary Commissioner Simon Upton, which already raised some serious questions: Because Overseer is a commercial enterprise, its source code was kept secret, making it something of a “black box” and difficult for outside scientists to peer-review. And yet at the same time, some savvy farmers could figure out how to fiddle the results in their favour. The code is jointly owned by a couple of fertilizer companies, along with MPI and AgResearch. Upton’s review “questioned whether the Government should buy the remaining share of the tool from the fertiliser companies and make it open-source”. That would certainly go a long way towards improving the transparency issue.