sidney wrote on Dec 6
th, 2018 at 7:27am:
Apple get a grip mate.. the argument is about the removal of introduced species - because of negative environmental effect..
So your solution is to ignore the argument? Even when flawed? Way to go with advancing the cause mate - why don't you just abandon rationality in favour of emotional response?
Quote:Im not going to say that correct farming practices cant build soils. I think though if you look at history the major effect of agriculture has been an overall soil loss.
Anybody ever composted organic material before?
What do you think it turns into? Where do you think that soil comes from? - yes of course it has mineral content, but it is primarily from the breakdown of organic material.
Conventional cropping and tillage reduces soil quality and quantity, and given that even pastural farming has moved to intensive cut and carry most of the world over - then yes most agricultural practice has resulted in soil degradation.
Not the case with rotational intensive pastural grazing systems though and dairy is the best at increasing soil quality and quantity. You lot all complain about the toxicity of excess nutrient from dairy - don't you? Nutrient builds fertility.
I have been involved in about 7 dairy farm conversions. Every cropping operation suffers from low organic material content in the soil and lowered soil quality/quantity. We know how long it takes before that is restored to performance after conversion.
And the soil level just keep increasing... its the only form of agriculture that builds soil fertility.
So the argument to remove animals for the reason of adverse environmental effect is simply wrong.... like everything too much can be a problem but not for the reasons this clown argues..
Kind of not what I was saying.
I wasn't talking about dairy. And what you are saying is only relevant to very easy contour high quality land dependant on soil type. Thats a small part of our total agricultural land area. As an example Waikato peat soils can loose 3.7 t of C per hectare a year if I remember correctly. And water quality measure almost always record a higher level of Suspended sediment in farming and pine areas than from native forest. The fact is that the issue of soil and carbon loss is going to affect grazing of hill country land considerably and even intensely farmed dairy where they rely on cropping to supplement. Pine trees are not an improvement either where you are clear felling every 25-30 years as proven at Gisborne.
I suspect that the push for pine plantation etc is more about ensuring land is no longer available for Grazing and come 25 years it may only be possible to revert that land to native if the green elements have their way.
Some interesting innovative thinkers out there, and I know of one landowner who is making $30,000+ a year out of harvesting goats from under his regenerating hill country forests.
Could be that some form of farming under permanent tree cover is a future possibility?
Which is the irony this F&B clown as you say, will never get due to his bias, that farming historically noxious animal species may well be our best solution.
The route you have gone down is one very positive avenue worth looking at from more farmers as well. But its going to take a lot of people getting their heads around at least a change in activities around supplemental feed and coming to the realisation that they may have to give up grazing of steeper aspects of their land.
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Letter in forest and Bird Newsletter (Read 1650 times)