Ignoring the good but not the bad

20-02-2012 | Alan Emerson

I recently attended the 25th annual workshop of the Fertiliser and Lime Research Centre at Massey University. It was a really interesting conference with all the players in the wider fertiliser industry there, all pulling in the same direction.

The workshop title was Advanced Nutrient Management, Gains from the Past, Goals for the Future and the national and international line-up of speakers provided a fascinating perspective of the issues involved.

What impressed me most was the outside the square thinking of many of the speakers.

AgResearch's Dr Stewart Ledgard kicked the workshop off with a session on Life Cycle Assessment, evaluating the resource use and environmental emissions throughout the lifestyle of a product.

That enabled the identification of "hot spots" and the best mitigation options for them. Ledgard believes the identification and development of low environmental impact agriculture systems has the potential to give us a competitive advantage in high-returning, environmentally sensitive markets. He had a compelling argument.

That was followed by the always entertaining Dr Doug Edmeades posing the question that it was not about how the soil supplied nutrients but how the plant acquired soil nutrients.

Professor Robert Glennon from the University of Arizona was both highly informative and entertaining. I never figured America would have a water crisis but he convinced me that it did.

Glennon's view was that the USA's lack of water was a major threat to the economy and "there was a total lack of political acceptance of the problem and that nothing was being done about it".

I certainly hadn't realised that fully-laden cargo ships could no longer float in Lake Superior or that the lack of water would, inevitably, see the death knell of the American ethanol industry. It takes 2500 litres of water to provide enough corn to produce one litre of ethanol with a further four litres required for processing.

The Glennon answer is to treat water as a commodity and put a price on it but he did say that whenever he suggested that to politicians he received blank stares.

The reality is that the water crisis in the USA will, in my opinion, have two possible outcomes. It will either create a major conflict with Canada if it tries to use water from the Great Lakes, as the USA has tried in the past, or with agriculture using 70-80% of water in the USA farmers' access will get cut and production will fall.

Returning to the New Zealand context there was considerable discussion about the nutrient management system, Overseer. Overseer, in my opinion, is a New Zealand environmental success story and an example of the co-operative approach of the wider fertiliser and farming industry.

It is the subject of continual improvement and the conference was briefed on initiatives to make it better. I think it is a good system now with many thousands of farmers using it. The fact that it will get even better is heartening.

There were many interesting speakers, all with the conference theme of going forward in an environmentally responsible manner.

There is a massive amount of work being done throughout the country on environmental mitigation strategies and how best to achieve them and make money for farmers.

Dr Alison Dewes presented an interesting paper on Minimal Footprint, Optimal Profit Farms. She put forward a convincing argument as to how farmers are employing low environmental impact farm systems and increasing their profitability. It can be done.

I was heartened by the number of regulators attending the conference. Local government had strong representation as did the Ministry for the Environment and the office of the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment that I was aware of.

Federated Farmers was represented as was Beef + Lamb and DairyNZ. It was also good to see the broader industry there, Ballance and Ravensdown, scientists, consultants, industry organisations and spreading contractors, all pulling in the same direction.

My disappointment is that the conference was totally ignored by the mainstream media.

If a single farmer gets prosecuted for discharging effluent it is in a host of papers, on radio and television.

If an industry gets together at a conference to work out how the country can earn more and pollute less it is totally ignored which I find depressing.

New Zealand can't survive without agriculture and the media needs to consider the positive aspects of our sector as well as the negatives. To me there are far more of the former, a reality blissfully ignored.

Further, the speakers were from all points of the globe and there was no-one there with any political perspective to hear what they had to say.

Politicians are quick to criticise farming and regulate us but, like the mainstream media, they ignore the good environmental stewardship most farmers practice.

I look forward, idealistically of course, to a Green Party presence at next year's workshop.

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