KEY POINTS:
If farmers want to cut greenhouse emissions and environmental pollution, improve animal and human health and better their economic returns from the land, they need look no further than the soil beneath their feet.
That's the simple but radical message that roving US agri-vangelist Arden Andersen hopes will sink in as he travels the globe promoting a holistic approach to farming, nutrition and climate change known as "biological agriculture".
"If we want to change human health, greenhouse gases and environmental pollution we have to get back to basic management of the soil," says Andersen, who visited New Zealand last week.
As a physician as well an agriculturist, he was prompted by concern for his patients' health to consider the role of soil in creating a situation where he says much of the food eaten today is "seriously nutrient- deficient".
Compared with food grown 40 to 50 years ago, modern fare contains up to 60 per cent fewer nutrients, Andersen says.
"We have to improve the nutrient density of our food to really impact the long-term health of society, to really address cardiovascular disease, diabetes and obesity. In developed countries we are starving to death on full stomachs. The problem is that the nutrients are not there."
But where did they go? Andersen blames decades of over-reliance on nitrogen fertilisers - or more broadly a fertiliser paradigm known as nitrogen-phosphorus-potassium, or NPK, which he says leaches out the soil's trace minerals, robbing the resultant food of those nutrients.
Andersen calls biological agriculture a combination of organic and conventional farming. First off it doesn't shun chemicals, but rather calls for a greater balance of inputs into the soil in order to re-establish nutrient balance and microbiological health.
Good soil management can also reduce the need for pesticides, by controlling weed and insect problems, he says. And it is key to preventing erosion and nitrogen loss.
But there is also an economic upside. Andersen cites Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry figures from 2005-06 showing that 70 per cent of New Zealand dairy farmers lost money despite rises in milk prices and production.
That was because the amount farmers spent on their farms had also risen, especially the price of the urea fertiliser, which has been lifted by the acceleration of the US biofuel industry.
But he says better soil nutrition requiring less urea, but with a wider ranger of nutrients including calcium and trace metals such as selenium, chromium and iodine improves the quality of pasture, increasing its dry matter and energy content and thus boosting animal health and production of milk solids.
Such a system also induces the recycling of manure instead of its runoff into the environment.
Andersen warns that the hunger to boost production is increasingly Americanising New Zealand pastoral farming, with a trend emerging towards adding corn silage to what once was an all-grass diet. "That's a guaranteed way to create more acidosis and animal health problems."
However, properly "biologically" fertilised pasture boosts both the cow's health and production without the need for silage.
"We solve not only environmental issues, but economic issues for the farmer, and we solve the health issue for the food chain."
More intriguing, though, is Anderson's claim that the approach has implications for global warming. "With the biological approach we start getting net carbon sequestration," he says.
That is because the biological approach boosts pasture's photosynthetic activity, which takes carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and converts it to sugar and plant matter.
And with half of the plant below ground, that carbon becomes stored in the humus - or organic matter - of the soil.
"Narrow-spectrum NPK fertilisers end up burning up humus as opposed to adding to it. Instead of sequestering carbon and creating more fertilising soils, we've been heading backwards."
While it may seem the way ahead, Andersen acknowledges it is difficult getting farmers to change, especially when they can just get the fertiliser company to make their decisions for them.
It's just like when he tells his patients they need to alter their diet, he says.
"If you want to change the outcome you have to change what goes into the system - a lot of farmers don't want to do that."
Andersen says the biological approach differs from organics per se. At one end of the spectrum is "organics by neglect", which he says means "if we do nothing for three years we're certified organic". At the other is the professional farmer, who attains organic certification but also manages the nutrients in the soil.
To reflect the difference, and to respond to retailer and consumer demand, Andersen has begun a nutrient density evaluation programme in the US called Beyond Organix, with he hopes to take global.
FIGHTING METHANE
Meanwhile the agricultural establishment - in the form of the Pastoral Greenhouse Gas Consortium - has just committed another $1.2 million a year over the next five years to find ways to mitigate methane and nitrous oxide.
But rather than look for answers in the soil, the consortium plans to use the funds to beef up research into rumen ecology, methanogen genomics and the development of a methane vaccine.
The extra funds increase the consortium's investment to $5 million a year for the next five years.
"This will be a significant boost to our work in finding ways to mitigate methane and nitrous oxide, the two main agriculture greenhouse gases," says chairman Mark Leslie.
The consortium, which was set up in 2002, is half-funded by the Government's Foundation for Research, Science and Technology and half by industry groups including Fonterra, Meat & Wool New Zealand, Dairy InSight, FertResearch, DEEResearch, PGG Wrightson and AgResearch.
Leslie says "promising leads for methane mitigation have been discovered" and he reports "the initial validation of nitrous oxide mitigations through the use of feed pads and nitrification inhibitors".
The consortium's research has also helped the accuracy of accounting under the Kyoto Protocol.
OPEN COUNTRY
It's not what you say but how you say it. Now that Dairy Trust controls 52.4 per cent of Open Country Cheese, the target's boss, Alan Walters, has piped up to advise that shares in the Waikato-based cheese exporter will continue to trade on the Unlisted internet trading facility "for the time being".
He qualifies his assertions even more, stating that there is no "present" intention to change this.
What is to be read between the lines here? Could it be a reference to the Takeover Code's "creep provisions" under which Dairy Trust gets to increase its holding by 5 per cent a year without making a full offer to shareholders?
Furthermore, Walters says Dairy Trust, whose takeover play for Open Country just scraped through, tells him it has no wish to make any material changes to the latter's business "at this stage". "However, the two companies will explore opportunities to work together to identify potential joint dairy initiatives and possible synergy gains," Walters says. Stay tuned on all fronts.
