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Federated Farmers water quality spokesperson Chris Allen says farmers are using a wide range of management techniques to reduce nitrate leaching in Canterbury.
Canterbury’s groundwater nitrate issue has been placed at the feet of the province’s farmers by environmental activists, but NADINE PORTER asks whether it s the farmers rather than the public that have been let down. It was 1994 when Chris Allen quit his long-term job as an Air New Zealand engineer and headed to Ashburton Forks in Mid Canterbury to become, of all things, a farmer. The farming climate he entered was fractured and bruised after the Labour government implemented tight monetary reforms to right an economy that had been bottomed out by former Prime Minister Rob Muldoon’s interventionist policies.
Greenpeace/Stuff
Greenpeace delivered a 33,000-strong petition in January to ask the Government to phase out synthetic nitrogen fertiliser.
Farmers and horticulturalists are using more natural nitrogen fertilisers in the face of ongoing pressure to reduce or stop using synthetic equivalents. Greenpeace delivered a 33,000-strong petition in January asking the Government to phase out synthetic nitrogen fertiliser. Senior campaigner Steve Abel pointed the finger at industrial dairy farming for allegedly “poisoning” public and private water sources for profit. The environmental campaigners launched a new petition last week calling on the minister of health and the Government’s new water regulating body to lower the recognised safe limits for nitrates in drinking water.