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Samah Seger (Aotearoa Liberation League)
This 20 minute video, fronted by the charismatic Samah Seger (Aotearoa Liberation League), makes the case that our mainstream media are spreading misinformation by playing up the economic importance of the dairy industry, while brushing-over its health-damaging nitrogen discharges into our drinking water.
To emphasise this point, the video uses segments from a recent TV1 Breakfast Show piece about nitrates in Canterbury’s drinking water. The scene is set with the host of the Breakfast Show announcing: “the economic contribution of dairy farmers is vital to the NZ economy”; however, he omits to mention that clean drinking water is vital to the very survival of New Zealanders!
This is the real story here – not so much mainstream media misinformation, which is now widely-accepted – but the harm caused by the production of milk in Aotearoa New Zealand to freshwater due to our industrial dairy farming model.
The basis of the TV1 story is a recent study by freshwater ecologist, Dr Mike Joy, which finds that it takes up to 11,000 litres of water to make 1 litre of milk (this figure includes the amount of water needed to dilute nitrates so that waterways don’t fall below national quality standards). However, Dr Joy only gets 33 seconds speaking time in the 10 minute segment:
“What we have highlighted is how much freshwater is harmed in the production of milk in Canterbury and it is the result of industrialisation of farming. If we had 12 times as much rain, that would dilute the nitrogen out to safe levels …but we’re not going to have that. What we need to do is to reduce the intensity, reduce the number of cows on the land” (Mike Joy)
In contrast, 6.5 minutes is given to the CEO of LIC, a dairy genetics company, who hardly mentions nitrogen leaching, but talks mainly about the – as yet unproven – potential of genetic modification to reduce methane emissions from cows’ belching. In this way, an uncomfortable story about dirty dairying becomes an advertisement for the very industry causing nitrate contamination, under the banner of “technology and research help pave new era of dairy farming”.
One farmer interviewed heralds his halving of nitrate losses in the last five years; however, Joy’s study highlights that even if every single farmer in Canterbury halved their nitrogen losses, they would still be leaching too much.
It is a pipe dream to expect that there is a technological solution which will enable Aotearoa New Zealand to continue producing the same amount of milk without continuing to damage our environment.
Nitrogen fertiliser is the root of the problem: “The nitrogen grows the grass, the cows consume the grass, and then they pee out most of the nitrogen, which then goes out into the soil and waterways”.
New Zealand puts nitrogen fertiliser on the ground in astronomically high amounts, using more fertiliser per person than any place in the world.
The dominant source of nitrate-nitrogen leached through soil into our waterways is Iivestock urine, with a 2017 study showing that of all nitrate leached from livestock, 65% was from dairy, and 15% from sheep.
However, the Breakfast Show piece doesn’t once mention “fertiliser” – the cause of this whole issue. Joy’s study says increased demand for synthetic nitrogen fertiliser from fossil fuels* seriously threatens global human sustainability. These threats include massive harm to our ecosystem, biodiversity loss, ozone depletion, plus increased risk of colorectal cancer, the second highest cause of cancer death in NZ
Joy cuts to the chase:
“Intensive dairying in dry areas like Canterbury is inherently unsustainable. That’s the problem”; however, he is also at pains to point out that, “farmers are not in any way to blame for this, the failing is the government – central and local – to stop this intensification from happening”.
Here in CHB we have seen first-hand local government’s complicity in driving intensification, with our past-Regional Council’s attempt to build the Ruataniwha dam. In the video, Environmental Canterbury (ECan) also comes under the spotlight. Environmental Canterbury is the ‘promotional’ name for the Canterbury Regional Council. Seger: “if a Regional Council is so keen to greenwash itself with a promotional name, you know it’s up to no good”. Sure enough, ECan staff are exposed for trying to bury the content of an internal report highlighting issues with nitrogen in the region’s waterways.
The video concludes with what might seem a radical solution: “If you ask us, you need to support farmers out of dairying – buy the land back and re-wild it – then we might have a chance to survive as a species.” Certainly, as our freshwater standards continue to rapidly deteriorate, changes to current unsustainable farming systems are inevitable.
* Nitrogen fertilizer is produced from natural gas, using the “Haber-Bosch process”. In several transformation steps, natural gas (essentially methane) is upgraded by combination with nitrogen from the air to form nitrogen fertiliser.The Haber process consumes around 5% of the world's natural-gas production.
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