Archive 2010

Voluntary efforts to control farm pollution failing Daniel Collins Mar 19

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Yesterday, the sh!t hit the fan.

Agriculture Minister David Carter:

“The data from this year’s snapshot tells a totally unacceptable story of effluent management. Regardless of whether this is because farmers don’t have the right tools, don’t know how to comply, or simply don’t care, behaviour has to change.”

The snapshot in question is a progress report on the Dairying and Clean Streams Accord, released by MAF. The Accord is a framework for national and regional government, farmers and industry to work together towards targets for improving water quality around farms.

Set in 2003, these targets are:
1. Dairy cattle to be excluded from 50% of streams, rivers and lakes by 2007, rising to 90% by 2012
2. 50% of regular crossing points to have bridges or culverts by 2007, and 90% by 2012
3. All dairy farm effluent discharge to comply with resource consents and regional plans immediately
4. All dairy farms to have in place systems to manage nutrient inputs and outputs by 2007
5. 50% of regionally significant wetlands to be fenced by 2005, rising to 90% by 2007.

Two of the 2007 targets were met in 2008/09.

Just two.

Cattle exclusion from 50% of riparian areas has been achieved in all regions. In fact, it has risen to 80% – well on it’s way to the 2012 target. What’s better is that 98% of regular crossings now have bridges or culverts.

Success various among regions. In terms of compliance with resource consents, the winner is by far Taranaki. The three furthest behind, in terms of full compliance, are Northland, Waikato and Canterbury.

Moving from the report to the reactions, Fonterra called the results “completely unacceptable”. They have recently strengthened efforts to get their farmers up to scratch with resource consents. This is not a surprise. As an international exporter, Fonterra is exposed to the whims of the international market, and any sustainability-based consumer choices it makes.

Green Party Co-Leader Dr Russel Norman was similarly disappointed:

“It’s time for the Government to regulate the impact of dairy pollution with enforceable water quality standards. Voluntary measures, which rely on individual farmers to make improvements to their practices and report their own progress, are simply not enough of an incentive,”

While Lachlan McKenzie of Federated Farmers was also “really disappointed”, they still managed to find a solver lining:

“While the focus will be on the negative, the industry’s openness and accountability is a much bigger positive.”

…while also managing a dig at regulatory authorities:

“This Report really highlights need for greater consistency with the way farms are inspected.”

Forest and Bird Advocacy Manager Kevin Hackwell noted that the increase in the average level of significant non-compliance by diary farmers rose from 12% to 15%.

“That’s a 25 per cent increase in serious non-compliance. It’s unacceptable that we are going backwards on environmental standards after seven years of the accord and with all that’s known about the impacts of intensive dairying on our waterways.”

And Fish and Game thinks the Accord should be scrapped. Neil Deans, Resource Management Coordinator:

“Compliance with regional council effluent rules and consent condition has actually dropped and other measures of progress have stalled. Targets such as the percentage of farms with a nutrient budget are as meaningless as the percentage of people with diet plans – it’s the day to day action that counts.”

The bottom line? Voluntary on-farm targets for reducing agricultural pollution are, on average, not being met. They are improving, and exposure to an increasingly sustainability-conscious market is helping. But, for whatever reasons, many farmers are failing to meet best management practices.

The question at the front of my mind is: Why? What I would love to see are the results of an anonymised survey of farmers, by an impartial social scientist, asking this very question.

Tumultuous week on NZ’s water front Daniel Collins Mar 19

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When it rains, it pours.

A lot happened in the last two days on New Zealand’s water front. For those on a blogging diet, here’s a fat-free summary. More to follow later.

  • A report on voluntary efforts to improve on-farm water management shows these efforts continue to fail, and in some ways getting worse. Agriculture Minister David Carter:

    “The data from this year’s snapshot tells a totally unacceptable story of effluent management. Regardless of whether this is because farmers don’t have the right tools, don’t know how to comply, or simply don’t care, behaviour has to change.”

  • Proposals to house 18,000 dairy cows in cubicles in the MacKenzie Country have been dropped, due to rising costs, while the farm investors aim to educate politicians and publics. Southdown Holdings director Richard Peacocke:

    “The irony of our situation is that stable-style farming is the way of the future if New Zealand is committed to environmentally sustainable farming.”

  • Labour MP Brendan Burns asserted that former National MP and Prime Minister, Dame Jenny Shipley, has already been settled on to take over ECan’s water governance on Monday. Minister for the Environment, Dr Nick Smith, denies this claim.
  • ECan Chair, Alec Neill, has decried the non-compliance of territorial authorities in terms of their resource consents:

    “Territorial authorities have called for the scrapping of Environment Canterbury and have suggested this would somehow improve water management.”

    “The territorial authority major non-compliance figures show they have some way to go to get their own houses in order.  It is not acceptable for Canterbury’s local bodies with a legislative RMA role to have ongoing issues of major non-compliance.”

  • And ending on a high note, the Northland drought has actually benefited local grape growers, leading to more favourful albeit smaller grapes.

WOMAD passes the Crikey Creek test Daniel Collins Mar 18

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I was enjoying the tunes at WOMAD last weekend, presided over by the Fuji-like volcano Mount Taranaki. When I heard Ojos be Brujo was going to be there, I was sold, but Calexico, The Skatalites and Babylon Circus pushed the gig beyond great. Several of the songs I heard not only rocked musically, but also hydrologically, winning the Crikey Creek Glass Harp of Honour.

Calexico, alt-country group from Arizona, sang about their artificial urban landscape set amidst a desert in ‘Man Made Lake’:

“I’m gonna walk these streets
Of cold concrete
Like I’m a ghost
Searching for its grave

Then I’ll dwell by the edge of this man made lake
And descend into the city
That holds no place for me”

The chorus of Scottish folk musician Eddi Reader’s ‘Follow My Tears’ puts tears in their place within the hydrological cycle:

“From my eyes to the river
From the river to the sea
From the sea to the drkening clouds
From the sky back down to me
Follow my tears….”

During some down time, I also dropped in to the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery to check out their Len Lye collection. I’ve admired his films and kinetic art since I was exposed to them in high school, but I was amazed to find another side of the artist. He regularly collected NYT and Time articles on science discoveries of the day, whose themes he wove into his paintings. I will be sure to dig into this art-meets-science ecotone when I get the chance.

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Happy St Patrick’s Day! Daniel Collins Mar 17

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With Guinness in hand, let us toast the technical advancements of the Irish.

Chicago_River_dyed_green

Let us also wonder how much green dye is used to turn the Chicago River green, or whether phosphorus runoff would achieve the same effect.

Improving on-farm water management: Lessons from California Daniel Collins Mar 17

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The Pacific Institute, based on Oakland, CA, has recently released a report describing seven case studies of how farmers in CA have improved water management. They illustrate…

“…diverse strategies for innovative water planning, use of technology, institutional management, economic incentives, and environmental protection and restoration.”

And they serve as lessons for other farmers in CA, but also in other water-challenged regions of similar socioeconomic and technical standing – New Zealand included.

The crops included in the stories number more than just seven: corn, rice, pasture, tomatoes, artichokes, lettuce, almonds, grapes, etc etc.

The approaches used to improve water management are also varied. Peter Gleick summarises several of the conclusions thus:

“Managing for multiple benefits. Each of the case studies offers multiple benefits and collaborations among diverse sectors of the economy.
Accurately measuring and monitoring water use. The most significant improvements in efficiency require good information on water use, climate and weather conditions, and more.
Capturing the untapped potential of existing technologies. In recent years, California farmers have made progress switching to water-efficient systems for distributing and using water but much more potential remains untapped. No new magic technology needs to be developed.
Setting targets and providing economic incentives to accelerate progress. Several of the case studies show how quantitative targets and economic incentives can be effective tools to accelerate water management improvements.”

The second point is the very same that won Fruition Science its Imagine H2O prize: monitoring transpiration of grape vines and irrigating when necessary.

Given the similarities I think exist between California and New Zealand, Canterbury and Hawkes Bay in particular, I expect to delve deeper into this report in the future.

Nothing to see here Daniel Collins Mar 16

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Unless you’re Technorati, in which case you want to read the string 67YTV55CAU9U to verify this blog. Ah, good old verification – crucible of fire – with one hand you pour praise on claims and hypotheses, and with the other you pour scorn. Your ends are unseen, because what matters are your means.

El Nino brings drought to Venezeula, and exposes a flooded town Daniel Collins Mar 16

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El Nino means different things to different people. “The boy”, in Spanish, in weather-related circles it is the warm phase of the El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) climate pattern. The cold phase is La Nina (”the girl”).

To Venezeulans, El Nino means a little more: drought. But this year’s drought brought a blast from the past – bitter-sweet memories. Water levels in the Uribante-Caparo reservoir have dropped so low, people can visit the Andean town of Potosi that was flooded in 1985 when the reservoir was first filled.

“Former town resident Josefa Garcia, 74, is grateful for the drought, even though it has triggered Venezuela’s worst-ever electricity crisis.

Standing in the shadow of a usually submerged 85-foot-high (26-meter-high) high church here, Garcia vividly recalls when then-President Carlos Andres Perez swooped in by helicopter to tell residents the town would soon be flooded.”

“He said we’d all be expropriated and we had to leave,” Garcia said, standing in the old village square. “It took our hope away.”
Before its flooding, this Andean town of around 1,200 in the western state of Tachira was evacuated and its residents dispersed around the country. Garcia moved to a nearby region, and had never revisited her former town until now.

National Geographic has some before-after photos of the church.

The history of reservoir development is studded with forced relocations. The government decides that the country needs irrigation or hydropower, and the residents of the valley are moved. Sometimes compensated, sometimes not, or not enough. This story rings true around the globe, West and East, North and South. Increasingly, the liberal democracies have phased out the practice, finding too much resistance or alternative options. Elsewhere, the forced migrations continue and we’ll visit some over the coming weeks. I wonder what John Rawls would have thought…

Why water is so weird Daniel Collins Mar 15

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I judged a book by its cover. There was this blue, amorphous blob in the throes of metamorphosis – yet frozen in time. The heading above it read: “The strangest liquid: Why water is so weird”.

It was the Feb 6 2010 edition of New Scientist, which I spied when buying the Jan-Fen 2010 edition of New Zealand Geographic. I had that consumeristic impulse. I bought it. A month later, when I got round to reading the article, I was not disappointed.

The article told the story of Anders Nilsson of Stanford University and Lars Pettersson of Stockholm University in their efforts to explain why water is indeed so weird.

What is common knowledge is that ice floats and water freezes first at the top. This is because water is the densest at 4°C. Very few other liquids behave this way – molten silica seems to be another. But wait, there’s more! Unlike most other liquids water becomes less viscous at higher temperatures, not more. Water has an uncannily high specific heat capacity, which rises both above and below 35°C whereas others have a single trend.

But, the child in us all asks, why?

Well, our heroes of the story, Nilsson and Pettersson, were using X-ray absorption spectroscopy to study the structure of an amino acid, way back 10 years ago. They realised that the water containing the amino acid was more interesting (quelle surprise!), and shifted their gaze to H2O.

Over the course of many more x-rays and several papers, they arrived at a theory to explain all of water’s weirdness: water molecules are capable of stacking themselves in not one but two configurations. One an ordered tetrahedral lattice and one a mixed up hodge-podge. It is the building and breaking of these configurations that ultimately leads, so the heroes say, to water’s wonderful properties.

This being science, though, more research is needed. There are sceptics. There are nay-sayers. There are applications like cheaper desalinisation. And there are children in us all who will continue to ask: But why?

Happy pi day! Daniel Collins Mar 14

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Hop over to Circle of Blue.

See how radial symmetry makes measuring stuff easier.

And don’t get depressed when things start to suck.

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World water crisis: Myth or reality? Daniel Collins Mar 13

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Asit Biswas, an expert in international water resource management, has changed his mind. He no longer believes a world water crisis is a crisis of physical supply. It is, instead, a crisis of management. He also does not believe wars will be fought over water. What gives? Have a listen.

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