Saving biodiversity starts here at home with changing agriculture
OPINION: As above, so below.
Healthy soil means healthy rivers, food and people. But restoring health and balance to the ecosystems we’re part of will require changes in the way we farm.
Human impacts on the planet since the Industrial Revolution show that things are badly out of whack.
In 2009, scientists developed a framework for measuring a ‘’safe operating space’ for humanity within environmental boundaries. They suggested that if we pass those boundaries, we risk catastrophic ‘’non-linear, abrupt environmental change’’.
But even while the framework was being developed, two boundaries were already crossed – safe nitrogen limits and biodiversity losses. Now, four boundaries have been crossed, including climate change and land use. Other limits include freshwater, ocean acidification and deforestation.
We might think these problems are happening somewhere else in the world, not here in ‘’clean green New Zealand’’. Deforestation, polluted rivers, the effects of climate change, are matters for other countries, not for us in ‘’Godzone’’.
Largely thanks to industrial dairying though, in Aotearoa we are living beyond safe local and planetary limits in nitrogen, freshwater quality, rainforest biodiversity, land use, and climate impacts.
The use of synthetic nitrogen fertiliser by agribusiness has increased by more than 627 per cent, from 59,000 tonnes in 1990 to 429,000 tonnes in 2015. That supported the near-doubling of our dairy herd from 3.4 million in 1990 to 6.3m in 2019.
This has led to a decline in freshwater quality. Now, our rivers are some of the most polluted in the world. Modelling shows 70 per cent of New Zealand’s total river length has elevated nitrogen contamination.
When those polluted rivers reach the sea, their toxic contents spill into the habitats of other endangered animals. Threatened pahu (Hector’s dolphins) swim in the outflow of Te Waihora (Lake Ellesmere), one of New Zealand’s most important wetlands, but one of the most polluted waterways in the country. An estimated 3200 tonnes of nitrate contamination washes off Canterbury dairy farms and travels through porous soils to poison the lake, every year. And from the lake, to the sea. This agri-pollution enters dolphin habitats around the country.
The link between exceeding those boundaries and human health is also clear. Too much fertiliser and too many cows lead to nitrate levels in private drinking wells that exceed safe levels. Some studies have linked nitrate levels in water with cancer.
When applied to land, synthetic nitrogen fertiliser, used primarily by industrial dairying to grow more grass, contributes more climate pollution than all our pre-Covid domestic flights. But even with all that extra grass, there are more cows than the land can support.
Big dairy has to import supplementary feed-like palm kernel expeller, from destroyed Malaysian and Indonesian rainforests, and soy from South America, implicating us further in the global biodiversity crisis.
Industrial dairying has pushed us beyond what’s safe for the planet, exceeding nitrogen, land use, biodiversity and climate change limits in one fell swoop.
But it needn't be this way.
Many farmers are already changing the way they do things. They’re responding to what our sick lands, soils and water are saying. They’re shifting from intensive dairying to regenerative organic farming that respects ecological limits. Biodiversity is a key component of regenerative agriculture, from nurturing the soil, to sowing diverse pasture and food crops, to having chickens pecking at the feet of pigs, lazing and grazing beside cows.
Through regenerative organic farming, we can restore diverse ecosystems and soil. We can have farms that flourish, along with clean rivers, surrounded by native bush where tūī call. We can eat healthier food and have thriving rural communities where people buy food straight from farmers.
Resistance to industrial agriculture is fertile – through regenerative organic systems, we can live within our planetary means, help heal the planet and produce food that doesn’t ‘’cost the earth’’.
Christine Rose is an agriculture campaigner for Greenpeace Aotearoa.