viewpoint
April 2016
with John Barnes – Managing Director
Our New Green Challenge
It was amazing to see a full front page article on the concerns regarding the effects of Cadmium in a popular fishing magazine ‘Fishing and Outdoors’. One would have to ask why we are seeing this in a fishing magazine and not a farming publication. I can only assume that the fishing fraternity sees poisons leaching into waterways as a threat not just an inconvenient problem. They have obviously been asking questions based on some MPI and local body reports that pinpoint the Waikato and other intensively farmed areas as having high Cadmium levels, and they know that if it is in the soil it will without doubt end up in the water and from there the fish and ultimately humans.
We in the fertiliser industry need to confront these issues and I was happy to answer questions posed to me by this magazine. We accepted a long time ago as a company that we must only sell products which cause the least environmental damage and in fact the Cadmium levels in our main bulk product is at a level up to ten times less than the industry average. I would like it to be nil, and in our liquids that is the case.
The point I want to make though is this… It is the consumers and customers that we have to worry about in agriculture. They are the ones that we should be directing our marketing to. And when you think on this, then maybe it is not such a surprise that this article was in a fishing magazine!!! Customers don’t want poisons in their food source and fishers are customers. These problems are now beyond the farm gate and we must do something about them now.
John Barnes, Managing Director, Fertilizer New Zealand.
There has been a lot of talk about changing to a more sustainable model of agricultural production. As I have already said and most commentators would agree that a new farming system will emerge. One article I found recently puts it this way.
NEW GREEN CHALLENGE: How to grow more food on less land.
“If the world is to have another green revelation to feed its soaring population, it must be far more sustainable than the first one. That means finding ways to boost yields with less fertiliser and re-thinking the way food is distributed”, says Richard Conniff.
He continues by saying “For researchers trying to figure how to feed a world of 10 billion people later in this Century, the great objective over the past decade has been to achieve what they call ‘sustainable intensification’. It’s an awkward term, not the least because of conventional agricultural intensification’s notorious record of wasting water, overusing fertilisers and pesticides and polluting habits. But the ambition this time is different, proponents say: To figure out almost overnight how to grow more food on the least land and with the minimal environmental impact.”
The alternative will be untenable. It will include food shortages and political unrest greater than we have today.
Fertiliser is a key topic of discussion everywhere – most obviously because sustainable intensification means curbing overuse in the industrial world. The European Union began regulating fertiliser use 25 years ago to reduce farm run off that was polluting ground water and turning water bodies hypoxic. The EU’s Nitrates Directive led to a 30 percent reduction in fertiliser use, even as yields were increasing substantially.
This has been my drive within Fertiliser New Zealand. I believe that a green intensification is both practical and possible; it is what I have been doing now for over 20 years. Some farmers have made that shift and are reaping the benefits. But it will need a paradigm shift in thinking for others and it will take time for them to work it through. The beginning of the process starts with the structure of the soil. This is the basis of the programme. Soils need carbon to hold all this together. It is not about how much fertiliser we have in the soil, although that is vital. It is about how well the fertiliser is being utilised by the soil and the plants that grow in it. An under-utilised fuel [fertiliser] is of no use and in the long term leads to pollution which is what we are seeing with our current widely used system. It is both wasteful and a danger to our environment, and indeed our personal health. How long can we tolerate this waste?