29 November, 2006
If we learnt to farm the top 12 inches of New Zealand’s soil we could not only live in a clean and green country, but a wealthy one too.
Richard Vallance, Chief Executive Officer of Ngati Whakaue Tribal Lands Inc in Rotorua, is a keynote speaker at the Soils and Society 2006 Conference which is being organised by Ensis – a joint venture between Crown Research Institute Scion and CSIRO in Australia.
Mr Vallance says about 70 percent of New Zealand’s export revenue comes from the primary sector which relies on farming only the top two inches of soil.
“Currently we feed the living daylights out of the top two inches of soil with high energy fertilizers, we only plant grasses that cover the same two inches, we leach nutrients like crazy into the shallow root zone and water ways and we erode top soil into the rivers.
“What if we learned how to use the top 12 inches? I strongly believe that it would lead to us having a much more economically productive farm sector, and it would reduce the environmental impact of farming,” he says.
Mr Vallance says a 12 inch active top soil that was harvested by active roots all year round would create its own recycling system that would prevent nutrient loss down through the water table. It would also stop almost all erosion, would vastly reduce nutrients leaching into rivers and lakes, and would increase economic output.
“But to work out how to achieve this we need much more research in this sector. New Zealand shut down research into productivity in the primary sector in the 1990s on the bet it was no longer needed. That was wrong.
“There is an urgent need to increase focus and research onto areas like this that can deliver the required goals of increased sustainable wealth creation from New Zealand soil.”
Mr Vallance says the research that is needed should cover areas such as the depth of top soil and biological activity; the depth of grass roots; and the animal systems, biology and productivity that the soil and grass support.
“In the future New Zealand is going to depend even more on the primary sector doing well. But to get vastly increased and sustainable wealth generation from soil, we must do the research now.
“We need to move away from the current research focus on defining nutrient losses and measuring erosion problems to look at ways of improving productivity in sustainable ways,” Mr Vallance says.
The Soils and Society 2006 conference is being held in Rotorua from November 27-30. The conference is organised by Ensis on behalf of The New Zealand Society of Soil Science (NZSSS) and is supported by the Rotorua Charitable Trust, Environmental Bay of Plenty, Environment Waikato, Ministry for the Environment, SLURI, Massey University and Ballance Agri-nutrients.
The conference includes technical sessions and a full-day field trip and has attracted scientists from New Zealand, Australia and the United States.
For more information on the conference, visit the New Zealand Society of Soil Science website www.nzsss.rsnz.org