Thread: Fish and Game

Any chemical fertiliser application is bad in my view. All that shit seeps through the ground into the water supply. You can meter it and put what you call a limit on it but at the end of the day it ends up in the ground. The plants dont absorb it all and its only ever building up or being washed into the water supply, its put on year after year after year etc. Put it on to thick and it kills grass. See where im going with that?
Its driven by the need to put as many stock units into a square meter as possible, so to feed them you need to grow more grass which means more fert and to suck more water out of the rivers and ground to put on your paddocks. Rivers are low here because its so dry and because of that more farmers are irrigating. Any chemical seepage into the waterways goes up in concentrate.
Unfortunately the price of land is outrageous so buying any sort of farm puts you in debt for the rest of your life. To try and pay off that debt you have to farm intensively. Never ending cycle.

Fencing off waterways doesnt do fuck all and is the least of our worries, all it does is keep townies happy. Spraying chemicals onto land which has the words eco-toxic and marine pollutant written on the drums is about as stupid as it fuckin gets.

The councils have alot to answer for but all they care about is dollar signs.

Originally Posted by Towely

Any chemical fertiliser application is bad in my view. All that shit seeps through the ground into the water supply. You can meter it and put what you call a limit on it but at the end of the day it ends up in the ground. The plants dont absorb it all and its only ever building up or being washed into the water supply, its put on year after year after year etc. Put it on to thick and it kills grass. See where im going with that?
Its driven by the need to put as many stock units into a square meter as possible, so to feed them you need to grow more grass which means more fert and to suck more water out of the rivers and ground to put on your paddocks. Rivers are low here because its so dry and because of that more farmers are irrigating. Any chemical seepage into the waterways goes up in concentrate.
Unfortunately the price of land is outrageous so buying any sort of farm puts you in debt for the rest of your life. To pay off that debt you have to farm intensively. Never ending cycle.

Fencing off waterways doesnt do fuck all and is the least of our worries, all it does is keep townies happy. Spraying chemicals onto land which has the words eco-toxic and marine pollutant written on the drums is about as stupid as it fuckin gets.

The councils have alot to answer for but all they care about is dollar signs.

It's amazing watching some of the country calender episodes, where farmers have gone for a more natural way of fertilizing and ended up with less costs, more production, less damage to the environment, and most importantly less work!
I'm really not a bunny hugging greenie, but as a very keen out doors man I am keen to look after our environment. I also find it fascinating the way we can harness natural process to get the same results as using chemicals, whilst getting the same out puts and again with less work (less work is always good in my book).

I'm also not so stupid to believe that intensive farming is ruining the planet, if people in cities were more conservative with water, recycled more, stopped throwing shit in the street which ends up in storm water. That'd make a huge difference to our waterways and country.

I know there's a lot of talk about fencing off water ways, but I was of the though that it's not stock entering the water and shitting that's the problem, it's more to do with large amounts of effluent or fertilizer entering the waterways, which contains lots of nitrogen, and makes water plant life grow more than it should and then somehow that's the bad thing.
So therefore the south island sheep in the water ways isn't really a problem.
Or am I wrong.

I'm not at all against dairy if anyone think's I sound that way, as milking cows is what has kept me employed my whole life.
But I thought that many of the south islands problems is trying to put intensive dairy farming in places it can't sustain, so having the same problems as any other dairy farming places, but the added problem of using a shit tonne of water to make it happen.
Dairy farming in the Waikato is great, as it has the right environment to grow lots of grass and feed for cows, but I don't like the though of making dairy fit into part's of the country it isn't meant to exist in.

Originally Posted by Towely

Any chemical fertiliser application is bad in my view. All that shit seeps through the ground into the water supply. You can meter it and put what you call a limit on it but at the end of the day it ends up in the ground. The plants dont absorb it all and its only ever building up or being washed into the water supply, its put on year after year after year etc. Put it on to thick and it kills grass. See where im going with that?
Its driven by the need to put as many stock units into a square meter as possible, so to feed them you need to grow more grass which means more fert and to suck more water out of the rivers and ground to put on your paddocks. Rivers are low here because its so dry and because of that more farmers are irrigating. Any chemical seepage into the waterways goes up in concentrate.
Unfortunately the price of land is outrageous so buying any sort of farm puts you in debt for the rest of your life. To try and pay off that debt you have to farm intensively. Never ending cycle.

Fencing off waterways doesnt do fuck all and is the least of our worries, all it does is keep townies happy. Spraying chemicals onto land which has the words eco-toxic and marine pollutant written on the drums is about as stupid as it fuckin gets.

The councils have alot to answer for but all they care about is dollar signs.

What you need to understand is that N and P are naturally occurring and are both leached/run off regardless of whether it's a beech forest or a dairy farm. So to put a limit on it rather than attempting to ban it makes sense. Where dairy farmers are improving is making their fert applications at times and in quantities that minimise leaching/run off. Fencing off waterways is important. But planting them is also important (many farmers are/have done this). P isn't very soluble any typically 'runs off' into water ways. Planting around the waterways captures the P, stopping the run off into the waterway.

If you put salt on grass, it will kill it; But I bet we have all consumed some today. It's all about relative quantities and understanding that some substances are harmful to one thing yet not to another.

I'm not trying to pretend chemicals are perfect and that we should use more of them. But how many chemicals you use every day? Where do they all go?

As far as people going natural no fert etc goes. There would be very few cases where they haven't significantly decreased production as a result. Where this matters is that the world isn't making any more land, but it keeps making more people and they all need to be fed. Supply and Demand, the rich will always buy it, the poorest will miss out and in some cases starve.

I remember back a few years before the recession when commodity prices were really high. Milk prices were high, grain prices were high too but we could still afford to feed it to our cows. I watched this doco about people in Africa who couldn't afford to buy enough maize grain so they would mix dirt with it in the milling process to make it go further.

It's an interesting world. All these do gooders trying to fix the world but all they ever seem to do is create another problem.