Western Daily Press (Saturday)
How can you farm with a third of fields under water?
Farmer Ro Collingborn looks at a real-life situation that’s set to impact on this country’s food production
IT would appear that torrential rain and excessive flooding will be part of our future. A brook dissects our farm, and every year the flooding gets worse. How possible is it going to be to farm, if a third of your fields are under water for long periods several times a year? It’s a question we’re going to have to face and it’s likely to impact on food production. In the last down pour, it was the speed at which the water levels rose, as much as the amount of rain that caused the damage, and many houses downstream of us experienced flooding. One poor 85-year-old man had water up to his neck inside his house.
In years gone by, there was brook maintenance. My husband said that when he was a boy, the Water Authority would come through every few years with a dragline excavator and clean out the Brinkworth Brook. This resulted in a light and airy free flowing watercourse. This was until the environmentalists got on board and said that the river should take its own course and this practice was stopped. Now willows proliferate along the banks, and where they fall into the brook, new trees root in the water, causing blockages and local flooding. Now we have an overgrown, and semi stagnant water course which, through lack of sunlight, is unable to support the diverse species that were once there.
One farmer upstream from us is willing to put in a large wetland which could be a solution to reduce flooding downstream, though so far there has been little encouragement from Wessex Water. I think they are concerned that raw sewage might end up trapped in the wetland as floods recede. Of course, if all raw sewage was properly treated, the water quality would improve greatly.
Moving to south America, in a column about the British countryside, might seem strange, but when it comes to climate charge, we are all in the same universe. In Amazonia in Brazil, the country is not getting its normal share of rain. Instead, it’s the worst drought for 100 years with rivers at such low levels that many villagers are unable to use the rivers for the normal transport of goods. The air quality is currently one of the most polluted in the world as the large Aggro companies are using the opportunity to burn the vegetation, for soya and cattle ranching.
Cattle ranching in the Amazon is the worst system possible. When the rainforest is cleared, huge quantities of carbon go into the atmosphere, monoculture African grasses are planted, with such huge soil erosion that the course of the rivers may be affected. This ranching is uneconomic in the long run as it only works in recently cleared land for a few years, and then the companies involved have to use massive amounts of imported nutrients or clear more forest. This industry is largely financed by money laundering by the immensely powerful Amazonian drug trafficking mafias. In Brazil it is now feared that it is too late for the Amazonian Rainforest, the lungs of the world, not to go into terminal decline. If our government does one of their unfortunate trade deals, they will be encouraging deforestation in the Rainforest.
There is an immense difference
between events in Brazil and another small country in South America.
Enter Ecuador, which has a significant slice of primeval rainforest, and in which against all odds, 60% of its population voted in this August to stop oil extraction in their forest area, even though it will have greatly adverse economic implications for this already poor country.
It needn’t have happened like that. Sixteen years ago, an agreement was made with the richer countries that they would pay £3.6billion in compensation for loss of revenue to cease drilling in the Amazon in Ecuador. When only 5% was pledged, as the US with its oil interests would take no part, the then Government reluctantly renewed the drilling licences. Environmentalists fought back. The laws in Ecuador state that If a petition has enough signatures, it can trigger a legally
binding referendum. It took years for the impressive three quarters of a million signatures on the petition to be verified, but eventually the referendum was held with the overwhelming result to cease oil production in the Rainforest. The Government is now legally bound to get the oil companies to dismantle all their drilling platforms and apparatus and to grant no more licences in that region. I think they should be rewarded by those 3.6 billion pounds that failed to reach them last time.
Governments are not altruistic; they are generally too concerned with the next election, and commitment to climate change may not be seen having the most electoral draw. Although it should have top place in policies, it won’t if the political parties think that voters are more concerned with the pound in their pocket, rather than saving the planet.
What has just happened in Ecuador should be an example to the world,
An event happening here in the South West, but also with climate change implications is that apparently there is now a big problem with the breakdown of waste in aerobic digesters for biogas. This would be normally be done by bacteria. In country areas it’s not so bad, but in towns like Bristol there are so many E numbers coming from processed food, that the bacteria can’t break them down.
Do we really want to eat food that isn’t good enough for bacteria?
Ro Collingborn is a Wiltshire dairy farmer and has been dairy chairman of the Women’s Food and Farming Union, on the Milk Development Council, the Veterinary Products Committee, the RSPCA Council and a Wiltshire Wildlife Trust director.