You are an interesting fellow Robert!. I was looking at Southland via Google earth (and trying to find your orchard) while listening to your interview, I had no idea how vast those plains are!! Must be a similar size to the Canterbury plains at least?.
She's big country down here Shunda, plain enough! We had a Columbian biologist staying and he talked about regions around the world where wet lands were not drained, as was the case with the Southland Plains, but instead modified to retain the water and used to produce food: vegetables, grains, fish, turtles, edible insects, building materials etc. It's frustrating to think of opportunities lost through linear thinking (must be flat, must be green grass, must be drained). Hope you enjoyed the interview. I've a some others done with different stations on different topics tucked away and if you'd like to hear them I can post the urls.
Yes Robert post them up. I hear what you're saying about wetlands. We had some very disturbing news on the Coast re dairy expansion the other day. Westland dairy have pushed south of the Fox hills and have given strong indications that they want to double (yes double) the land that is currently used for dairy on the West Coast. The chairman said "all we need to do is clear some scrub and forest" and drain some wetlands no doubt. He said dairy only covers 2% of the West Coast and that could easily be increased to 4%. What he didn't mention is that *measly* 2% represents a far greater proportion of the remaining lowland forest in New Zealand. The ignorance of those statements really gets me wound up!! Actually, I will post what he said on Frog blog.
4 comments:
You are an interesting fellow Robert!.
I was looking at Southland via Google earth (and trying to find your orchard) while listening to your interview, I had no idea how vast those plains are!! Must be a similar size to the Canterbury plains at least?.
She's big country down here Shunda, plain enough!
We had a Columbian biologist staying and he talked about regions around the world where wet lands were not drained, as was the case with the Southland Plains, but instead modified to retain the water and used to produce food: vegetables, grains, fish, turtles, edible insects, building materials etc. It's frustrating to think of opportunities lost through linear thinking (must be flat, must be green grass, must be drained).
Hope you enjoyed the interview. I've a some others done with different stations on different topics tucked away and if you'd like to hear them I can post the urls.
Yes Robert post them up.
I hear what you're saying about wetlands.
We had some very disturbing news on the Coast re dairy expansion the other day. Westland dairy have pushed south of the Fox hills and have given strong indications that they want to double (yes double) the land that is currently used for dairy on the West Coast. The chairman said "all we need to do is clear some scrub and forest" and drain some wetlands no doubt.
He said dairy only covers 2% of the West Coast and that could easily be increased to 4%.
What he didn't mention is that *measly* 2% represents a far greater proportion of the remaining lowland forest in New Zealand.
The ignorance of those statements really gets me wound up!!
Actually, I will post what he said on Frog blog.
"[..under threat because dairying is spreading so quickly here..]" -classic
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