farming
Adopting the Aquaculture of the Future in Thailand
Somporn Kaikaew is the owner of Prapapan Farm in Nakhon Pathom, a city 40 miles west of Bangkok. He farms tilapia fish and white shrimp across 160,000 square meters of land.
We hitch a ride on the back of Somporn’s pickup truck, driving along the dusty roads that separate the fish farm’s large ponds of water. His farm is tightly operated, with the ponds segregated neatly, along with bird traps and scarecrows to deter predators and sophisticated recirculation systems to keep the water clean.
There are thousands of monoculture fish farms in Thailand, but Somporn, 60, has been practicing polyculture fish farming for the best part of three decades. When asked whether it was a more complicated operation farming multiple species, he said it’s all he’s ever known.
Somporn Kaikaew (right) has been practicing polyculture on his fish farm for 30 years. Credit: Tommy Walker
“I’ve had this farm for 30 years and I’ve always mixed from the beginning. I copied from another farmer, it looked like it worked so that’s why I did it,” he said.
In Thailand, farming fish and shrimp together is one of the most common practices in polyculture farming. It’s also the first step toward bigger changes in sustainability that Thailand’s aquaculture and fishing industry could see in the coming years.
That’s the hope of aquaculture experts as they prepare to convince more of Thailand’s fishing farmers to shift to a more sustainable model in which marine species are grown within the same system. That system, which is already being successfully practiced on a few fish farms in Thailand as well as in many other places worldwide, is called Integrated Multi-Trophic Aquaculture (IMTA). In IMTA, multiple organisms from different trophic levels — rungs on the food chain, essentially — are farmed together in such a way that they complement one another, thereby reducing waste and improving growth efficiency. This combination of sustainability and efficiency is better for the environment than monoculture — and more profitable, too.
At Prapapan Farm, we stop at one pond as one of Somporn’s farmers casts a mesh fish net and captures a couple of tilapia fish. A few meters away, another pond is filled with white shrimp.
“We feed both mixed and separate fish and shrimp. The benefit is we can sell both, but shrimp is the trend of the market [at the moment],” Somporn says.
Credit: Tommy Walker
Farming fish and shrimp together, as Somporn does, is a common practice in Thailand. And it’s the first step toward a more complex, sustainable system.
As Somporn explains, the fish’s feces help to make the water balanced and are consumed by the shrimp. The processing, he says, isn’t complicated; he’s able to sell the shrimp in just two months and the fish in five to six.
“In the past the old generation fed the fish and shrimp separately, but it’s not good money and slower for profit,” Somporn says. “But more of the new generation are mixing them together, which is good profit and good results and that’s why we do it this way.”
Thailand’s fishing industry plays a big role in the country, both economically and socially. The thousands of miles of coastline that span 24 provinces in the Gulf of Thailand and the Andaman Sea provide a rich source for local fishermen to catch millions of metric tons of fish and marine life each year. This crucially contributes to jobs, income and livelihoods for hundreds of thousands of people. The accessibility of seafood also means fish is a cheaper option and protein source for many Thais compared to chicken, pork and beef, especially for those living in coastal areas.
“In the past the old generation fed the fish and shrimp separately, but it’s not good money and slower for profit,” Somporn Kaikaew says. Credit: Tommy Walker
Thailand’s economy is also heavily dependent on exports, accounting for over half of the country’s GDP. The country’s shrimp exports produce billions of dollars for the local economy, despite the industry being affected by disease in the last decade. Overall, Thailand’s agriculture, forestry and fishing industry contributes to over eight percent of the country’s GDP. Around 1.5 percent of that comes from the fisheries industry as of 2021, data shows.
But some aquaculture experts hope more Thai fish farmers will fully incorporate the IMTA model within their farms in the future to increase revenue.
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Of course, the reasons to practice IMTA go beyond the financial. Dr. Pitchaya Chainark, an expert in coastal aquaculture at Kasetsart University, sees IMTA as a way to increase both Thailand’s fishing industry’s GDP and farmers’ income as well as create a balance of conservation and sustainable use of aquaculture resources.
“In Thailand there are not many [practicing] right now, as many prefer to do polyculture. IMTA is different, it is like a food chain. The species should have symbiosis and help each other,” she says.
Thailand produces more tilapia than any other freshwater fish. Credit: Anupan Praneetpholkrang / Shutterstock
In an ideal IMTA system, a higher trophic species, such as a fish, would be paired with suitable middle trophic species, and then lower trophic species such as plants and invertebrates. The cycle would see the plants consume waste, such as fish feces, sediments and uneaten feed to boost their own growth. The trophic species would be grown in conjunction with each other, providing the farmer with more seafood to sell.
In China, IMTA has already provided an environmentally sustainable and profitable solution for nearly two decades. Professor Jianguang Fang of the Yellow Sea Fisheries Institute in Shandong says IMTA was implemented starting in 2000, mainly to combat “self-pollution” that had come from too many intensively fed aquaculture systems in Sungo Bay, Shandong province. According to Fang, the pollution caused high levels of sediment and nitrogen in water, which can cause an excess of nutrients that can decrease the amount of oxygen in the water. Now, fish farms on Sungo Bay have implemented IMTA systems with high and low trophic species, including fish, seaweed, shellfish and abalones. Because there’s a market in China for all of the farmed species, farming this way is boosting profits.
One aquaculture multi-species system at Sungo Bay also included kelp, oysters and seaweed. The farm became more sustainable and profitable when the density of seaweed was reduced — which sped up growth — which eventually led to the farmers’ income growing by a huge 97 percent.
Credit: Tommy Walker
Though only a few fish farms in Thailand are currently practicing IMTA, aquaculture experts — seeing the success IMTA has had in China and elsewhere — hope the practice will catch on more broadly.
In Thailand, Dr. Pitchaya is now waiting on the government’s decision to approve a proposal to work to increase the practice of IMTA. Government grants would assist farmers in the transition. The hope is that once more Thai fish farmers find success using IMTA, other farmers, seeing the financial benefits, will follow suit.“[We are] already speaking with the farmers,” Dr. Pitchaya says. “In Phuket we have two farms that are practicing, and we are trying to promote them to other provinces.” She wants to help smaller farmers by getting them to consider both the financial and environmental benefits. “If my proposal is accepted, I think next year more than 50 farms will be practicing IMTA,” she says.
The first instance of IMTA in Thailand was a cage aquaculture system in the coastal areas of Phuket. And it’s already had an environmental, societal and economic impact. Effluent waste has been reduced through the use of biofilters, and there are decreasing environmental costs. According to Dr. Pitchaya, IMTA has boosted the economy as well as employment at local levels. Thailand now hopes to expand and create earthen pond aquacultures in the east of the country.
But some farmers are still reluctant to change.
Phaisal Phanchatree is the owner of Phaisarnpanpa Farm, a monoculture fish farm in rural Bangkok. He operates his farm out of a garden space in front of his house. Like Somporn, he has also been in the fish farm industry for three decades.
“We have had this business for 30 years. It’s a family business, but I’m the main worker,” he says.
Phaisal Phanchatree runs a monoculture fish farm out of a garden space in front of his home in rural Bangkok.
Nearly a dozen small ponds, filled with different species of fish including tilapia, lie next to his driveway. A wooden structure covered with blue polyethylene liner separates each habitat, large enough for Phanchatree to maneuver between the ponds.
He believes focusing on one species is the “sincere” way. “It is not cheating the customer,” he explains. “We can sell the fish with the knowledge they were grown this way. It’s not only a selling focus, if we teach the customers how it works, and they are successful, they are going to return to buy fish from us. It’s sustainable.”
Although he insists he will always keep farming fish, he admits there is more money in farming several species, and acknowledges that shrimp is more profitable.
Credit: Tommy Walker
Some longtime fish farmers, like Phaisal Phanchatree, are committed to focusing on just one species and not interested in converting to IMTA.
“Some farmers have a low budget and add the shrimp to feed together, and the result is very good,” he notes. “The main reason is to save on expenses, to save money on the feed. We only focus on fish. If we include shrimp, we have more work, more equipment to buy.”
“I’m not interested in mixing species in the future,” he adds.
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Sukkritt Nimitkul, a lecturer at the department of aquaculture in the faculty of fisheries at Kasetsart University in Bangkok, says with prices and competition increasing, farming one aqua species may not be enough in the future for many farmers.
“It’s a tough sell for the farmers. I think they have run out of margin,” he says. “When you have a lot of margins, you can afford to be reckless but now you don’t have that anymore because the labor prices are going up.”
“Shrimp is the trend of the market,” says Somporn Kaikaew. Credit: Amnat30 / Shutterstock
“The older generations have their old ways and don’t want to change. When you do polyculture, you must make sure that the last three months of the species’ lifespans come together. That requires a lot of rotations, planning, categorizing and moving around. So that is quite complicated and time consuming for some farmers.”
But Sukkrit believes change is inevitable.
“Farms will be forced to change in the future, in my opinion, because now the gap [in] the margin is closing,” he says. “Adapt or die will be my word. You must adapt, or the businesses will go out of business.”
The post Adopting the Aquaculture of the Future in Thailand appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.
Moo Woo
What we want to believe and what is true are seldom the same thing.
By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 15th April 2024
We draw our moral lines in arbitrary places. We might believe we’re guided only by universal values and proven facts, but often we’re swayed by deep themes of which we might be unaware. In particular, we tend to associate the imagery and sensations of our earliest childhood with what is good and right. When we see something that chimes with them, we are powerfully drawn to it and attach moral value to it.
This results from a combination of two factors: finding safety and comfort in the familiar, and what psychologists call “the primacy effect” – the first thing we hear about a topic is the one we tend to recall and accept. These tendencies contribute to the illusory truth effect: what is familiar is judged to be true. We go to war for such illusory truths, and sacrifice our lives to them.
Few illusions reach us earlier than the story of the benign livestock farm. Pre-literate children are repeatedly exposed to farmyard tales. The impression these books and animations create – the animal farm as a place of kindness and harmony – seems extremely hard to shake, regardless of people’s later exposure to the realities of the industry. When we see imagery that reminds us of farmyard storybooks, we feel a glow of recognition. When we hear arguments that chime with these stories, we want to believe them.
This, I think, explains the popularity of films that provide a rosy view of livestock farming, such as Kiss The Ground and The Biggest Little Farm. The latest contribution to the genre is a British film called Six Inches of Soil, now enjoying considerable success in independent cinemas. It follows the travails of three young farmers, “during the first year of their regenerative journey”. It’s well produced, makes some good points and tells some good stories. But it is also, in recounting the story we want to hear, fatally one-sided and, in crucial respects, wrong.
Livestock farming ranks with the fossil fuel industry as one of the two most destructive industries on Earth. But because of those farmyard tales, reinforced by stories we’re told as adults in endless books and films celebrating the pastoral, we apply entirely different standards to it. Parts of this film could be clipped and used as advertisements for the most damaging of all livestock products: beef. Astonishingly, it was made not by meat companies but by environmentalists.
It purports to show a cattle farm in Cornwall helping to prevent climate breakdown. Hannah Jones, from an organisation called Farm Carbon Toolkit, tells the farmer that, through the growth of his hedges and woodland, “you are removing more greenhouse gases from the atmosphere than you’re actually emitting”. The farmer, Ben Thomas, responds: “It’s such a great marketing tool for us.”
I see this sequence as highly misleading. Before long the farmer will need to cut the hedges, releasing much of the carbon they’ve captured. Even in the film, we see him coppicing trees in his woods to make way for his cattle, which will oxidise most of the carbon they’d accumulated over 20 years. More importantly, the counterfactual scenario went unmentioned: if his cattle were removed from the land and it was allowed to rewild, far more carbon would accumulate, both above and below ground, and this would not be counteracted by the farm’s emissions. The government’s Climate Change Committee estimates that switching from grassland to woodland in England would eventually “increase the soil carbon stock by 25 tonnes of carbon per hectare” on average. Given that we reduce our land use by an average of 76% when we switch to a plant-based diet, the opportunity cost of using land for a cattle farm should feature in any discussion of whether or not it is saving carbon.
The conversation moved on to soil. The film created the clear impression that Thomas had made even bigger savings across the year by increasing the carbon content of his soil. Pointing to a massive rise in soil carbon in Jones’s “table of emissions and sequestration”, he remarks, “So the hedgerows are amazing anyway, and the woods are pretty good. But the soil has absolutely smashed it.”
This seemed extremely unlikely. First, there’s no academic study anywhere, meeting the necessary criteria, that shows sustained net greenhouse gas removal through soil carbon storage by a cattle farm. Recent research explains why such efforts have failed, and always will: partly because soil carbon soon saturates, while farm emissions continue. Second, the technologies required to demonstrate such an annual shift do not exist. Moreover, to establish that carbon has stayed in the soil, rather than simply cycling through it, you would need to show that the shift had been sustained for at least 20 to 30 years.
When I asked Farm Carbon Toolkit how such a claim could be justified, it dropped a bombshell: the sequence, after being “edited down by the film-makers”, failed to make clear that they were discussing not the actual figures on the farm but “a modelled scenario”. In other words, though viewers were not told, the numbers weren’t real. When I challenged the film-makers, they accepted this, and told me “it’s possible” that they might change the editing for the video-on-demand release of the film. I hope they do. In the meantime, cinema audiences should be warned that it creates a misleading impression.
These sequences look to me like moo-woo: the oft-repeated and oft-debunked story that cows can protect the atmosphere. It’s as if environmentalists had made a film about artisanal coal mining, told heroic stories about the workers, and allowed their viewers to believe that coal mined this way is good for the planet.
This story is perfectly aligned with the livestock industry’s greenwashing. Like the film, it liberally uses the term “regenerative”, which means whatever you want it to. It wrongly claims that cattle can be carbon neutral or carbon negative and that beef-eating can be eco-friendly.
Such persuasion narratives have real and massive impacts. The European Union is currently deleting its nature restoration proposals in response to farm lobbying. In the UK, a culture war against Natural England, whipped up by livestock farmers on Dartmoor and their supporters in parliament, threatens the protection of our nature sites. No other industry has benefited as much from unpaid propagandists: well-meaning people unwittingly acting on its behalf.
A magnificent aspect of our humanity is that we can change our beliefs in response to evidence. It’s time to exercise this faculty, and put away childish things.
Dry Run
The mega-droughts in Spain and the US are a portent of a gathering global water crisis.
By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 4th March 2024
There’s a flaw in the plan. It’s not a small one: it is an Earth-sized hole in our calculations. To keep pace with the global demand for food, crop production needs to grow by at least 50% by 2050. In principle, if nothing else changes, this is feasible, thanks mostly to improvements in crop breeding and farming techniques. But everything else is going to change.
Even if we set aside all other issues – heat impacts, soil degradation, epidemic plant diseases accelerated by the loss of genetic diversity – there is one which, without help from any other cause, could prevent the world’s people from being fed. Water.
A paper published in 2017 estimated that to match crop production to expected demand, water use for irrigation would have to increase by 146% by the middle of this century. One minor problem. Water is already maxed out.
In general, the dry parts of the world are becoming drier, partly through reduced rainfall; partly through declining river flow as mountain ice and snow retreats; and partly through rising temperatures causing increased evaporation and increased transpiration by plants. Many of the world’s major growing regions are now threatened by “flash droughts”, in which hot and dry weather sucks moisture from the soil at frightening speed. Some places, such as the southwest of the US, now in its 24th year of drought, may have switched permanently to a drier state. Rivers fail to reach the sea, lakes and aquifers are shrinking, species living in freshwater are becoming extinct at roughly five times the rate of species that live on land and major cities are threatened by extreme water stress.
Already, agriculture accounts for 90% of the world’s freshwater use. We have pumped so much out of the ground that we’ve changed the Earth’s spin. The water required to meet growing food demand simply does not exist.
That 2017 paper should have sent everyone scrambling. But as usual, it was ignored by policymakers and the media. Only when the problem arrives in Europe do we acknowledge that there’s a crisis. But while there is understandable panic about the drought in Catalonia and Andalusia, there’s an almost total failure among powerful interests to acknowledge that this is just one instance of a global problem, a problem that should feature at the top of the political agenda.
Though drought measures have triggered protests in Spain, this is far from the most dangerous flashpoint. The catchment of the Indus river is shared by three nuclear powers – India, Pakistan and China – and several highly unstable and divided regions already afflicted by hunger and extreme poverty. Today, 95% of the river’s dry season flow is extracted, mostly for irrigation. But water demand in both Pakistan and India is growing rapidly. Supply – temporarily boosted by the melting of glaciers in the Himalayas and the Hindu Kush – will, before long, peak and then go into decline.
Even under the most optimistic climate scenario, runoff from Asian glaciers is expected to peak before mid-century, and glacier mass will shrink by about 46% by 2100. Some analysts see water competition between India and Pakistan as a major cause of the repeated conflicts in Kashmir. But unless a new Indus waters treaty is struck, taking falling supplies into account, this fighting could be a mere prelude for something much worse.
There’s a widespread belief that these problems can be solved simply by enhancing the efficiency of irrigation: huge amounts of water are wasted in agriculture. So let me introduce you to the irrigation efficiency paradox. As better techniques ensure that less water is required to grow a given volume of crops, irrigation becomes cheaper. As a result, it attracts more investment, encourages farmers to grow thirstier, more profitable plants, and expands across a wider area. This is what happened, for instance, in the Guadiana river basin in Spain, where a €600m investment to reduce water use by improving the efficiency of irrigation has instead increased it.
You can overcome the paradox through regulation: laws to limit both total and individual water consumption. But governments prefer to rely on technology alone. Without political and economic measures, it doesn’t work.
Nor are other technofixes likely to solve the problem. Governments are planning massive engineering schemes to pipe water from one place to another. But climate breakdown and rising demand ensure that many of the donor regions are also likely to run dry. Water from desalination plants typically costs five or 10 times as much as water from the ground or the sky, while the process requires masses of energy and generates great volumes of toxic brine.
Above all, we need to change our diets. Those of us with dietary choice (in other words, the richer half of the world’s population) should seek to minimise the water footprint of our food. With apologies for harping on about it, this is yet another reason to switch to an animal-free diet, which reduces both total crop demand and, in most cases, water use. The water demand of certain plant products, especially almonds and pistachios in California, has become a major theme in the culture wars, as rightwing influencers attack plant-based diets. But, excessive as the watering of these crops is, more than twice as much irrigation water is used in California to grow forage plants to feed livestock, especially dairy cows. Dairy milk has much higher water demand even than the worst alternative (almond milk), and is astronomically higher than the best alternatives, such as oat or soya milk.
This is not to give all plant products a free pass: horticulture can make massive demands on water supplies. Even within a plant-based diet, we should be switching from some grains, vegetables and fruit to others. Governments and retailers should help us through a combination of stronger rules and informative labelling.
Instead, they do the opposite. Last month, at the behest of the EU’s agricultural commissioner, Janusz Wojciechowski, the European Commission deleted from its new climate plan the call to incentivise “diversified” (animal-free) protein sources. Regulatory capture is never stronger than in the food and farming sector.
I hate to pile yet more on to you, but some of us have to try to counter the endless bias against relevance in politics and most of the media. This is yet another of those massive neglected issues, any one of which could be fatal to peace and prosperity on a habitable planet. Somehow, we need to recover our focus.
Outrage Farming
What led the Prime Minister to join a protest against his own government’s policies?
By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 28th February 2024
Step back a pace to see how weird this is. Last week, the prime minister of the United Kingdom joined a protest against one of the UK’s four governments. Farmers had obstructed a road in Llandudno with their tractors to demonstrate against the Welsh government’s attempts to meet its environmental obligations under UK law. The policies the protesters were attacking are similar to the policies Rishi Sunak’s government has introduced for England. The main difference is that in Wales, the offer for farmers is better – with more consistent payments and a smoother transition from the old system.
Sunak leads a government that has introduced the most draconian anti-protest laws in our democratic history. These laws are deployed exclusively against official enemies: environmental campaigners, republicans, feminists, Muslims. If you belong to one of these groups and you block a road, you might go to prison. If you are a farmer and you block a road, the prime minister might join you.
The protest the prime minister attended displayed the banners of No Farmers, No Food, a group convened by a notorious conspiracy theorist, James Melville. He has promoted many of the usual rightwing fictions: claiming that 15-minute cities create urban prisons; falsely downplaying the impacts of Covid-19; pushing anti-vax messages to the point of absurdity; and evenappearing to fall for a deliberately planted falsehood, designed to trap thoughtless conspiracy theorists.
He inveighs against the measures required to prevent climate breakdown – with one exception. Last December he argued that instead of changing anyone’s lives, we should plant “billions” of trees. As if to show how cynical his new campaign is, No Farmers, No Food promotes attacks on the Welsh government’s efforts to plant more trees.
No Farmers, No Food has also been pushing standard conspiracy fictions. It has become catnip for the global far right, some of whose leading figures have lent their support. Do farmers really want to be represented by this organisation?
Farmers in the UK have genuine grievances. In many cases they receive a tiny share, or none at all, of the profits from the sale of food, which tend to be captured by supermarkets and processors such as flour mills. These buyers also impose absurdly tight standards, which have nothing to do with food quality and everything to do with their own convenience. Farmers are also right to contest the one-sided trade deals with Australia and New Zealand that Liz Truss rushed through at breakneck speed, so she could have something to boast about at the G7 summit in 2021.
But these were not the main focus of Friday’s protest in Llandudno and the much bigger one in Cardiff today. These demonstrations are aimed at the Welsh government’s attempts to green farming. Or, to be more precise, at a fictitious story about its efforts to do so.
Perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of this campaign is that the Welsh government’s consultation paper already proposes to meet all but one of the protesting farmers’ demands. The single exception is the protesters’ insistence that the badger cull is resumed, to stop bovine TB: a policy that has repeatedly been shown to make the problem worse.
The consultation, at great length and with unprecedented care, was co-designed with farmers. It has been shaped around the sector’s demands. Even before the current paper, which has responded to yet more feedback, the government’s proposals enjoyed widespread support among farmers.
The only gap in the plans is the exact amount of money farmers will receive. But this is out of the Welsh government’s hands. It’s waiting on the Westminster spending review. Who controls the spending review? Ah yes, Rishi Sunak, who told the protesters on Friday: “It’s absolutely not right, the impact it will have on your jobs, your livelihoods, your incomes and food production around the country.”
Neither Sunak nor the other protesters show any sign of having read the proposals they’re complaining about. The current protests are uninformed, reactive, misleading and a waste of farmers’ energy and attention. But for culture war entrepreneurs and the far right, they’re paydirt. Real farmers are being played by outrage farmers.
Those of us who have read the consultation can see that the Welsh government isn’t forcing farmers to do anything. It is simply proposing changes to the subsidy system. Instead of subsidising ongoing destruction, as the EU’s terrible policies did (escaping the Common Agricultural Policy is the one genuine benefit of Brexit), it applies a basic principle, also endorsed by the Westminster government: public money should deliver public goods. None of the conditions it proposes to attach to farm subsidies are unreasonable; all can help to improve the viability and resilience of farm businesses.
In fact, the proposed measures have the opposite problem: they are woefully unmatched to the scale of the environmental challenge we face. No Farmers, No Food might deny it, but we are in the midst of a climate emergency. The most prominent figures in the current protest movements are Welsh sheep farmers. I don’t blame them for it but, with the possible exception of scallop dredging, sheep farming in the UK has the highest ratio of destruction to production of any food business in Europe. It produces a very small amount of lamb and mutton, yet, because sheep selectively browse out tree seedlings, it keeps some 4m hectares of our hills deforested. That’s similar to the total area used to grow cropshere. In the uplands, the situation could be summarised as “Lots of Farming, Little Food”.
Sheep farmers I’ve met who have joined these protests talk a lot about “the treeline”. But there is nowhere in Wales too high for trees to grow. Britain’s western hills would, in the absence of sheep, be largely clothed with temperate rainforest, one of the richest and rarest habitats in Europe. This environmental disaster has been created by subsidies: sheep farming otherwise makes a loss. It is taxpayer-funded destruction on an industrial scale. The Welsh government’s proposals do little to address this catastrophe.
We all have a right to be heard on this issue: there should be no taxation without representation. But in setting farm policy, all four governments of the United Kingdom tend to listen almost exclusively to farmers. Even this, the protesters insist, is not enough. Their message to us is, in effect, “give us your money, with no strings attached”.
Joining these protests, Rishi Sunak is yet another opportunist seizing his chance, using fake grievances to distract attention from real injustices. But this one, God help us, is our prime minister.
How Farmers Are Preparing for a Saltier Future
When Arjan Berkhuysen and his fellow volunteers on the Dutch island of Terschelling looked for a spot to start a garden, they sought the least fertile location they could find. The plot they landed on is just over a dike from the Wadden Sea along the Netherlands’ northern coast. The water in the irrigation ditches is often brackish. For most growers, salinity is an affliction; salt in soil or water can diminish plant health and reduce crop yield. But for this group of gardeners, the spot was ideal.
De Zilte Smaak — “The Salty Taste” — specializes in edible plants that grow in saline conditions, like samphire, tiny spears that resemble asparagus, and tender-leafed sea aster. The salt-loving delicacies grown on this plot end up on plates in restaurants across this island, a popular summer destination. The project is one of a number of initiatives in the Netherlands exploring the possibilities of farming in salty conditions, ranging from edible plants in small-scale gardens like this, to identification of salt-tolerant varietals of conventional crops like potatoes and beets.
Most of the vegetables De Zilte Smaak grows are distributed to local restaurants. Courtesy of Stichting De Zilte Smaak
In the Netherlands and worldwide, more and more farmers are facing challenges with food production as climate change makes soils and water saltier. Globally, an estimated 20 percent of cultivated land is affected by salinity. In the Netherlands, where a quarter of land is below sea level, some regions are seeing impacts already, and salinity is expected to become a more prominent hurdle for agriculture in the decades ahead. But recent developments are proving it’s possible to adapt farming techniques and crops to saline conditions.
“As humans, we tend to always adapt the environment to us,” says Berkhuysen, a member of De Zilte Smaak’s board. “Here, [we] try to adapt ourselves to the environment.”
For cooking, salt can make food tastier. But for farming, it’s generally bad news. When salt becomes concentrated in soil or water, it can damage plants, reduce the yield of crops, and even make farmland useless.
Oesterblad, or oyster leaf, is among the salt-tolerant plants De Zilte Smaak grows. Courtesy of Stichting De Zilte Smaak
“It can be a big problem because for a lot of cash crops salinity is not good,” says Kate Negacz, an assistant professor with Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam’s Institute for Environmental Studies. She heads the Saline Agriculture for Adaptation (SALAD) project, which is researching saline agriculture in Europe and North Africa. “They will perform worse, which can then lead to food security challenges.”
Salinization is not a new problem. Evidence suggests salinity hindered ancient societies from Mesopotamia to Peru. But phenomena associated with climate change and other human activities are driving salinity in a number of ways. Warmer temperatures, for instance, lead to higher rates of evapotranspiration; as water leaves the soil through evaporation and is taken up by plants, salt is left behind. During periods of drought, when there’s little rain, salty seawater can seep inland via groundwater and the mouths of rivers. Even in areas far from the coast, salt can concentrate as groundwater depletes. Rising sea levels are also leading to more flooding involving saline water, leaving impacts on the land.
In a rice-growing region in Vietnam, where salinity once reached 30 to 50 kilometers from the coast, it now is seeping in more than 100 kilometers. Inland areas are affected too: in Australia, severe salinity impacts more than one million hectares of formerly productive farmland. Mid-Atlantic farmers in the United States are struggling with salt patches. Coastal erosion and sea-level rise in Egypt are deteriorating the quality of cultivated land.
The post How Farmers Are Preparing for a Saltier Future appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.
An Ancestral River Runs Through It
Jeff Wivholm isn’t partial to mountains. He likes to be able to see the weather rolling in, something remarkably possible in the northeastern corner of Montana.
On a cold January morning, Wivholm drives the dirt roads between farms in Sheridan County, where he’s lived for all his 63 years, with practiced ease, pointing out different plots of land by who owns them. And if he doesn’t know the family name, Amy Yoder with the Sheridan County Conservation District or Brooke Johns with the Medicine Lake National Wildlife Refuge — both sitting in the backseat of his truck — can supply it.
If you look to the right there, Wivholm says, you can see the valley created by the aquifer. Maybe he can, his eyes accustomed to seeing dips and crevasses in, to an unfamiliar eye, a starkly flat landscape. He laughs and says it takes some getting used to.
That aquifer isn’t unique in Montana. There are 12 principal aquifers running like underground rivers throughout the state. But the way Sheridan County uses the water is.
The Big Muddy Creek flows through dams and diversions, pictured on the right, that are managed by the Medicine Lake National Wildlife Refuge to fill the lake as needed. Credit: Keely Larson
Montana is in relatively good shape as far as its groundwater supply goes, something uncommon across much of the country, geologist John LaFave with the Montana Bureau of Mines and Geology says. State politicians initiated a groundwater study over 30 years ago after years of intense drought and fires and a lack of data.
But Sheridan County was ahead of the game: The county’s conservation district started studying its groundwater in 1978, before state monitoring began.
In 1996, the district was granted a water reservation, or water allocated for future uses, from the state, which meant it could take a certain share of water from the Clear Lake Aquifer. Because of all the data it gathered through studying its groundwater, the district developed a unique way of using and distributing that water.
What’s unusual is how intentional the collaboration was and how extensive the groundwater monitoring was and continues to be. The district does this by working with farmers, tribes and the US Fish & Wildlife Service (USFWS) to ensure water can be used by those who need it — those who would be most affected by any degradation to the water — without negatively impacting the environment.
And it’s worked. The conservation district has been using its geologically special aquifer — a gift granted to this area by the last Ice Age — to irrigate crops, provide jobs for the region and keep agriculture dollars within the community for almost 30 years while fielding few complaints.
“To me, this represents the way groundwater development should occur,” LaFave says.
Sheridan County is extremely rural, home to about 3,500 people across its 1,706 square miles. Agriculture is a big economic driver. Bird hunting is an attraction for locals and visitors. The Medicine Lake National Wildlife Refuge, located in both Sheridan and Roosevelt Counties and managed by the USFWS, is home to many migratory bird species. It’s the largest pelican breeding ground in Montana and the third-largest in the country.
This early January morning, it’s about five degrees, but there isn’t a lot of snow on the ground. Over coffee and breakfast in Plentywood — the county seat — Yoder and Wivholm say this winter has been warmer and drier than usual.
From left to right, Jeff Wivholm, Marlowe Onstead and Amy Yoder look through maps of irrigation pivots and aquifer allocations inside the Sheridan County Conservation District office in Plentywood. Credit: Keely Larson
Dry weather is not uncommon here. Droughts in the 1930s and ’80s were particularly rough. Also in the ’80s, irrigation technology was becoming more common and efficient, Wivholm says, and people began to pay more attention to the possibility of an aquifer as a way to ensure water would be available for irrigation.
“There are several nicknames for much of this property, but it was basically ‘poverty flats,’” Jon Reiten, hydrogeologist with the Montana Bureau of Mines and Geology, says. The soil is sandy, gravelly and drought-prone. Not great for dry-land farming.
Marlowe Onstead was the first farmer in Sheridan County to use the aquifer for his pivot irrigation in 1976.
“Couldn’t raise the crop on it before,” Onstead says. After irrigation, he was able to grow alfalfa.
According to Reiten, the aquifer ranges from a mile to six miles wide and two to three hundred feet deep. The ancestral Missouri River channel, discovered in Sheridan County in 1983 as monitoring began, flowed north into Canada and east into Hudson Bay. That channel was dammed by glaciers in the last Ice Age and left behind a reservoir that was buried as glaciers melted, creating the Clear Lake Aquifer. Since the materials left behind were coarse and varied, water could move easily and be stored in great depths. A downside is that these glacial aquifers can take a long time to refill.
The vertical white cylinder is one of many that Amy Yoder with the Sheridan County Conservation District checks throughout the growing season. She opens up the top, connects the data logger inside to a laptop and collects information on the aquifer water level and how much water has been used for irrigation. Credit: Keely Larson
As drought dragged on in the ’80s, locals and county and state authorities set about figuring out the best way to distribute the aquifer’s water. Medicine Lake lies on top of some of the aquifer, and the Big Muddy Creek — where the Fort Peck Tribes require a minimum in-stream flow to promote ecosystem health — is at its southwestern border.
The Fort Peck Tribes and the USFWS were concerned about their respective water levels and how they’d be impacted by irrigation. Reiten says the USFWS was objecting to just about every water rights case that went to the state at the time, and all that litigation ended up in water court.
“That’s a lot to put on a producer, to have to go up against the federal government,” Reiten says.
Negotiations with the USFWS and the Fort Peck Tribes led to the formation of an advisory committee and the transfer of the water reservation on the aquifer from the state to the conservation district. (Per Montana water law, all water belongs to the state and individuals are required to get a water right to use it in a particular way — in this case, for irrigation.) Since then, Sheridan County Conservation District has had the authority to give water allocations from the Clear Lake Aquifer to producers without the producers having to appeal to the state.
The maximum amount of water that can be pulled from the aquifer is just over 15,000 acre feet total, a number set by the state’s Department of Natural Resources and Conservation. Currently, the district is using about 10,000 acre feet. Increases are allowed as long as monitoring shows the aquifer isn’t being overly impacted by irrigation.
Credit: Keely Larson
The Medicine Lake National Wildlife Refuge is home to the third largest pelican breeding ground in the country and the largest in Montana. Negotiations with the US Fish & Wildlife Service, which manages the refuge, helped Sheridan County Conservation District obtain the water reservation for the Clear Lake Aquifer.
“We were basically forced to monitor it, but it only makes good sense,” Wivholm, who has been on the conservation district board since 1994, explains. The district wouldn’t want to grant someone a right only to find out in five years that there’s not enough water.
Once a year, the committee meets to assess new water rights. The committee includes the Montana Bureau of Mines and Geology, the state Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, representatives from the Medicine Lake National Wildlife Refuge, county commissioners, a county planner, the Fort Peck Tribes and a representative with the United States Geological Survey.
If a farmer wants an irrigation pivot, they have to “pump it hard for 72 hours,” Wivholm says, to make sure there is enough water for their request, and understand how that pumping affects other wells nearby.
Data comes from Yoder’s efforts. She collects readings from data loggers placed in the ground throughout the county from April through October. For the first and last collections, she visits 201 wells and it takes her three 12-hour days to get to them all. Driving around in Wivholm’s truck, she points out some of her data loggers sticking up from the ground every few minutes.
Through monitoring, Sheridan County Conservation District and the Montana Bureau of Mines and Geology have been able to map the entire aquifer. They take note of the water levels, monitor each irrigation pivot and can see seasonal fluctuations.
Rodney Smith’s pivot is the largest connected to the aquifer. The structure in the foreground remains stationary, while the rest on wheels moves around — pivots around — the fixed structure. Credit: Keely Larson
“It’s kind of a hidden resource, but the amount of crops that we can get off of the poor ground that is above the aquifer is amazing,” Yoder says. She lists corn, wheat, chickpeas, lentils, canola, mustard and alfalfa.
Another farmer in the area, Rodney Smith, has been irrigating from the Clear Lake Aquifer for over 35 years and has the biggest pivot connected to the aquifer.
Smith says irrigating has been economically beneficial: His farm isn’t as dependent on the weather, and it’s taken the risk out of production. Smith Farms Incorporated produces hay for livestock and sells it to other ranchers in the area. Smith also leases land out to other farmers who grow potatoes and sugar beets.
From an aerial view, his circular pivot plots show different colors of green and brown, indicating a variety of crops grown.
Smith had an early contested pivot case with the state of Montana, before the water reservation was transferred to the conservation district, which went to the state water court.
The gist of the case was that Smith Farms wanted to change their method of irrigation and the USFWS was concerned it might impact the Medicine Lake National Wildlife Refuge. Data and monitoring done by the conservation district backed up Smith’s case.
“When you start irrigating, you wonder what is the capacity, or how much can you irrigate,” Smith says. “It’s always interesting to know what it’s doing.”
Credit: Google Earth
Land that is irrigated with pivot irrigation shows up in circular plots from above due to the way the structure pivots around a fixed point. Here, the circular pivot plot is sliced into different colors where different crops or phases of harvest have occurred.
Johns, with the wildlife refuge, says the refuge has a water reservation on Medicine Lake and is allowed to keep the lake filled for the protection of migratory birds. The refuge operates dams and diversions to maintain this need. Making sure any irrigation wouldn’t draw down the level of the lake has been a goal from the beginning, Johns says, and so far, that hasn’t been an issue.
There haven’t been any other contested cases on aquifer irrigation, and many, including Smith, see this as a success in having local control over a local resource.
“Water rights are such a contentious thing,” Johns notes. “And without the data, had they not started this years ago, it would be hard to start it today and get the same momentum they did.”
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Arnold Bighorn, water rights administrator for the Fort Peck Tribes, says the collaboration between all those affected by the aquifer — counties, tribes and the wildlife refuge — has worked well.
“Everybody’s on the same page, which is good,” Bighorn says.
Monitoring groundwater like this is unique in Montana, according to Reiten, particularly for irrigation development. But there are successful examples in other states.
Before he came to Montana, Reiten worked for the North Dakota State Water Commission, where the same type of monitoring was going on that he helped start in Plentywood. He is working on another aquifer in Sidney, Montana, about 85 miles south of Plentywood, to develop a similar system.
“We’re applying the same methods there to try to develop that aquifer without affecting anything else,” Reiten says.
Wivholm, who has lived in Medicine Lake, Montana for all his 63 years of life, drove along dirt roads earlier in the day with ease, knowing the pheasants and grouse would flap out of the way as his truck sped along. Credit: Keely Larson
Many conservation districts across Montana have water reservations on surface water, Yoder says, but Sheridan County Conservation District is one of only two districts that manages a groundwater reservation.
“I haven’t heard of any other places that have quite the extensive monitoring that we have and the time range that we have,” Yoder says.
There continues to be room for more water and improvement in how it’s used.
Wilvhom would like to see soil monitoring, so producers can know when to water and when they’re using too much. Devices are available that farmers could bury in the ground to monitor soil moisture and temperature.
Managing the aquifer has been “a collaboration to help the whole community do good,” Wivholm reflects later in the week, when Plentywood has reached -58 degrees with a windchill. “It helps the whole health of the whole ecosystem.”
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Agrarian Populism
Farmers’ protests are being embraced by the far right. The precedents are chilling.
By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 19th January 2024
When environmental activists calling for less pollution sit in the streets, across Europe they are now abused and attacked, arrested and handed extreme and draconian sentences. When farmers contesting pollution rules block entire city centres and major roads, set light to haybales, filling the highways with smoke, and spray manure on government buildings, the authorities sit and wait for them to go home. Few, if any, are prosecuted, and those who are receive small penalties. The promise of equality before the law has seldom looked emptier.
The hard right and far right demonise people who challenge the status quo, and valorise those who seek to restore it. Governments and police forces across the rich world have proved all too responsive to their demands.
I understand the sense of threat felt by farmers, as environmental rules are belatedly enforced. In some cases, attempts across Europe to make farming greener, reducing its release of nitrogen, cutting diesel subsidies, limiting water abstraction and banning some pesticides, have been clumsily introduced and badly implemented. I understand that life is tough for many farmers, as it is now for workers in almost every sector. Like all of us, they have a right to protest. And other people, as in all cases, have a right to scrutinise their protests.
There are good reasons to do so. Farmers’ movements in several European nations are being influenced or exploited by political forces in ways that have chilling historical precedents. Alternative für Deutschland in Germany, Rassemblement National in France, the Sweden Democrats, Fidesz in Hungary, the Brothers of Italy, the Dutch far right and similar groups across the continent are cynically using farmers’ plight and protests as a means of building support. Farmers, some of these groups claim, embody the soul of the nation, but they are being uprooted by “globalist” forces, seeking to “replace” them with immigrants. The far right’s resurgence in Europe is fuelled to a large extent by what used to be called “agrarian populism”.
There are similar trends in the US. The Oath Keepers, and the Three Percenters, two of the militias that led the attack on the US Capitol building in January 2021, consolidated around an agrarian revolt against state and federal authorities. After the rancher Cliven Bundy was ordered to remove the cattle he had illegally herded on to public lands in Nevada, harming the brittle desert ecosystem, these militias arrived to defend him. In an armed confrontation on the freeway, they forced federal agents to back down. Then they stalked, harassed and threatened to kidnap officials: several had to flee the region and hide in safe houses. Though they committed crimes that in other circumstances would have been treated as terrorism, few were prosecuted or even arrested. Their impunity in Nevada is likely to have encouraged their attack on the Capitol.
As they did a century ago, these political movements exploit genuine crises: the accumulation of wealth by the few and impoverishment of the many, the erosion of workers’ rights and the stagnation of wages, public austerity and the multiple failures of public provision, the restriction of political choice as major parties cluster round neoliberalism, the destruction of small businesses – including small farms – by large ones, the environmental disasters now hammering many communities. They then use these crises as weapons against the very people seeking to address them: leftwing and environmental parties and protest movements.
Among their tactics are lurid conspiracy fictions. While, a century ago, similar political voices raged against “aliens” and “cosmopolitans” (Jews and other supposed “outsiders”), today these movements rage against “immigrants” and “globalists”. While demonising two plutocrats (Bill Gates and George Soros), today’s groupings align openly or tacitly with others, such as Elon Musk, Charles Koch and Donald Trump. A selective approach to financial power (demonising “Jewish bankers” while receiving funds from supportive plutocrats) was also a feature of 20th-century fascism.
It all looks horribly familiar. As the historian Robert Paxton points out, “It was in the countryside that both Mussolini and Hitler won their first mass following, and it was angry farmers who provided their first mass constituency.” Not all agrarian populism was right wing. In Russia, the US, France, Spain and Italy, there were socialist and anarchist strands. But while some progressive forms remain, the dominant varieties gravitate once more to the far right. And other agrarian strains, promoting conspiracy fictions, begin to sound like it.
In a podcast in 2021 with the anti-vaxxer and presidential candidate Robert Kennedy Jr, with whom she has long campaigned, the celebrated agrarian advocate Vandana Shiva claimed that first Gates “locked us all in for one year”; now he is “taking all this to the next step”, to “create starvation and hunger through lockdown, so that there is no food”. At one point, she says Gates will “make the right to good food a crime”, and at another says he has a plan to “empty out” people’s minds “by mining data and patenting it and turning everyone into zombies”. There are solid reasons to criticise Gates – we don’t need to make stuff up. Of global financial institutions such as the World Bank, she says, “That’s how the Shylocks of the world work: get you into debt and then want the pound of flesh.”
The grimmest themes in European history are being shamelessly disinterred at or around the farmers’ protests. At the tractor blockade in Berlin this week, some people displayed the flag of the Landvolkbewegung, a 1920s antisemitic agrarian movement. It troubles me that so much has fallen down the memory hole: the disgusting race politics of Rudolf Steiner, who developed biodynamic farming; Germany’s Lebensreform movement, which claimed that Jews were “injecting putrefying agents into the nation’s blood and soil” (ours is not the first age in which bucolic and anti-vaccine sentiments have merged); the Artaman League, which sought to restore an imagined agrarian past, on which the Nazis built their blood and soil politics; and nostalgic British farming movements led by fascist sympathisers such as Rolf Gardiner and Jorian Jenks.
It’s also troubling to see how few people in the 2020s are prepared to confront the far right’s new agrarian populism. Those who should contest these politics cringe and cringe again: there seems to be a moral forcefield surrounding farmers’ protests, defending them from criticism. As the left seeks to avoid a clash with supposedly “authentic” and “rooted” movements, the far right exploits this timidity. George Santayana’s famous maxim haunts our days. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
Solar Pumps Are Empowering Women Farmers in India
Narrow roads lead to Harpur, flanked by small houses with expansive courtyards on both sides. Harpur is a small village perched at one corner of the Bandra block in Muzaffarpur district in the Indian state of Bihar, and though it may look like any other rural village, it is home to a group of women farmers who are at the forefront of a revolutionary change.
Historically, this region has grappled with water scarcity, which sharply limited the crops that farmers could cultivate. But since women-led self-help groups stepped in and installed solar pumps to provide affordable clean energy for irrigation, the scenario has changed dramatically. And along the way, these groups are challenging traditional gender norms, making women farmers a catalyst for climate adaptation.
The post Solar Pumps Are Empowering Women Farmers in India appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.
A Community-Driven Path to Replenishing Groundwater in a Parched Region
A lone tractor trundles along a bumpy road in Banda, one of the most drought-prone districts in the North Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. Up until a few years ago, soil here would dry and crack into fissures deep enough for unwary cows to fall in. Today, as we drive toward a little village called Jakhni, we see rice paddies usually found only in much wetter climes. A large pond comes into view, and behind it, Jakhni.
Thanks to a revival of old farming practices and growing community involvement in all matters relating to water, this village is now known in India as a model jalgram, or water village.
Jakhni is a settlement of barely 1,600 people, mostly farmers. Its stony, hilly terrain is typical of Bundelkhand, an arid region spread across parts of the neighboring states of Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh. This region receives between 800 and 1,300 millimeters of rainfall annually, but locals quip that like their children, who all tend to migrate for better opportunities, the rainwater runs off too. The rocks that lie beneath the region are not very porous, and there are relatively few aquifers (layers of underground water). As a result, most of the rainwater flows away from the region instead of being locally absorbed.
“Growing up, the water scarcity we experienced in Jakhni was scary,” Uma Shankar Pandey, a 52-year-old resident of Jakhni, recounts.
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Shitshow
Toxic chemicals deliberately added to sewage are being spread across a vast area of farmland, with potentially catastrophic effects. We’re suing the government to stop it.
By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 18th November 2023
It’s an experiment with 8 billion test subjects, no controls and no endpoint. What happens when you release thousands of novel chemicals, most of which have not been tested for their impacts on human health or ecosystems, into a living planet? What are the effects on the development of foetuses, on human brains, other organs, immune systems, cancer rates, fertility? What are they doing to other species and to Earth systems? We seem determined to find out the hard way.
The gap between our actions and our knowledge is astounding. Of the 350,000 registered synthetic chemicals, about a third are impossible to assess, as their composition is either “confidential” or “ambiguously described”. For most of the rest, deployment comes first, testing later. For instance, the health and environmental impacts of 80% of the chemicals registered in the European Union have yet to be assessed. And the EU is as good as it gets. Our own government, as one of the benefits of Brexit, has just decided to downgrade the safety information chemical companies have to provide toan “irreducible minimum”.
Far from shielding us from this chemical load, the government is knowingly and actively exposing us. In 2017, the Environment Agency produced a startling report on the contamination of the sewage sludge being sold or given to farmers as fertiliser by water companies. It revealed that there has been a radical change in the disposal of many industrial wastes. Instead of taking their liquid waste to dedicated disposal facilities, chemical and cosmetics manufacturers now pay water companies for the right to dump their loads into sewage treatment works.
In other words, two completely different waste streams – human excrement and industrial effluent – are being deliberately and irremediably mixed. This filthy cocktail is augmented by runoff and drainage from roads, building sites, businesses and homes, laced with everything from tyre crumb to PFAS (“forever chemicals”). When this chemical shitstorm hits the sewage system, it’s either pumped directly into rivers through illegal discharges by the water companies or held back as sewage sludge, now a toxic and highly complex mess.
What then happens to it? Well, the next steps are as clear as sewage. There are, the report says, “a number of gaps in the Environment Agency’s understanding of what water companies are doing with tankered industrial wastes, how they handle them and … the destinations of sludge generated”. A proliferation of “waste brokers, contractors and subcontractors” ensures that the tracking of waste from source to sink is almost impossible. Transfer and consignment notes fail to list the industrial effluents the sludge contains or to explain where it is going. It is often “miscoded”, creating a false impression that it’s safe.
But from what the agency can tell, “much of the mixed sludge was destined for farmland”. That’s not surprising: about 87% of sewage sludge ends up as fertiliser. The manufacturers get cheap disposal for hazardous waste, the water companies get paid for accepting it, and farmers get cheap or free manure. But they are not informed about the added extras.
The testing rules for sewage sludge being sent to farmland have not been updated since 1989, and cover only heavy metals, fluoride and pathogens. But thanks to the mixing of waste streams and the proliferation of new synthetic chemicals, it now contains a vast range of toxins. These include, the report shows, polychlorinated biphenyls, dioxins, furans, phthalates, forever chemicals, antibiotics, huge quantities of microplastic and many other compounds. There are no legal limits for any of these poisons in the sewage sludge being spread on farmland. The report notes that some of the samples it took of sludge being sent to farmland were “vastly different” from the way they were described in the consignment documents. Agricultural land, in other words, has become a dumping ground for hazardous industrial waste – another gift to humanity from the privatised water industry.
A great acreage of both arable and pasture land is likely to have been contaminated with a vibrant cocktail of environmental toxins. What are the effects? We have no idea. Soils receiving this sludge are routinely tested only once every 20 years, if at all, and for none of the new contaminants. The report notes that their cumulative effects could render the soil “no longer … suitable for supporting crop growth”.
Alarming as the chemical levels it discovered were, the report states that these are likely to be “best-case examples”. A source at the agency tells me it did not investigate sludge from sewage systems receiving heavy industrial loads: the true extent of contamination is likely to be far worse. “Some of the levels,” they tell me, “are horrendous. The human health risks are phenomenal.” In some cases, this contamination would prohibit building houses on the land. “But you can grow crops and raise animals on it for human consumption!”
The 2017 report proposed urgent action to investigate the full range of contaminants and their accumulation in the soil, to separate waste streams, code and track them properly, and to change the dumping regime. So what did the government do? Bury it. The report was discovered only in 2020, as a result of a freedom of information request by Greenpeace. To this day, it has not been officially published and cannot be found on any government website. Only after it was brought to light did the government promise to take action: first immediately, then later in 2020, then in 2021, then in 2023. Nothing has happened. It published a feeble set of proposals with a 2023 deadline, but failed to adopt them.
Losing patience after six years of inaction, a group of us founded a new legal campaign, Fighting Dirty. We wrote to the government, challenging its failure to meet the 2023 deadline. Its immediate response? It dropped the deadline. So now, as the first of our cases, we are taking the government to court. We’re crowdfunding a judicial review of its failure to monitor and regulate the spreading of sewage sludge on agricultural land*.
This shitshow won’t end by itself. A lawsuit might be the only remaining means of protecting our farmland, our living systems and our health. Wish us luck.
*We met our target almost immediately, so we’ve now closed the crowdfunder