Thread: Fish and Game

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.