Science must balance restraint

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For some time I have thought that most of our urban counterparts will, on rare occasions, get to read some of our farming magazines.

So for this column I thought a few bits and pieces from Bruce Wills and I would go some way in getting our urban counterparts to understand what has been achieved and could be achieved in future.

As our current Federated Farmers national president Bruce Wills is about to step down in July, this is what he had to say about nitrogen leaching: Dairy farmers on light soils may have to accept a cut in cow numbers to reduce their nitrogen leaching. They would have no other alternative. "We're losing too much nitrogen. The massive shift to dairying has caught us, and the science hasn't kept up."

He goes on to say "the easy yards" of fencing, modern effluent systems and fertiliser application have been done, but nitrogen was still leaching into streams.

It's going to be a hard conversation, but we have to have it. The guys leaching 70-90kg of nitrogen per hectare a year on light soils will have to get that down to 30-40kg.

If science won't change the goods, we are going to have to get these people to change their farming systems. That's not easy when a lot of them have borrowed many millions of dollars to get a system going and they've got a bit caught up with interest payments.

While farmers were prepared to act more responsibly to protect the environment, their businesses had to remain economic. The worry for Bruce Wills is he has a fear the pendulum has swung too far in favour of the environment.

Now, given that when Bruce was elected to our national president's role three years ago, a group of provincial presidents knew, as an organisation, we needed to make the move from being a bunch of money-grabbing farmers who gave little thought to our environment and were seen to be raping and pillaging all in front of us for the sake of the mighty dollar.

I can remember a time when we had national presidents calling all environmentalists "eco-warriors". Who in their right mind would talk to us?

So, if the pendulum has swung too far in favour of the environment, how can we, as farmers, find a balance that enables us and the rest of the community to live in harmony?

Science tells us our intensive farming is having an impact on the environment, and the only way we are going to get credibility and respect will be to front the issues better than we have done before.

Future scientific research will need to focus on finding ways to increase production under environmental constraints, so we do need good science along with good farming practices to achieve a lasting economically and environmentally sound strategy for future generations.

Mike Barton, award-winning beef farmer, Taupo, had this to say: "A permanent pasture is something that lasts over 100 years. I need science to tell me how to establish those pastures and I need science to tell me how to maintain them".

Brian Doughty is president of Wanganui Federated Farmers