The Love of our Land

We will succeed or fail if we stay the same

As a proud resident of Canterbury New Zealand. I have only ever lived and farmed here and its a place I have a deep seeded passion for. We need to look after this great country, and it needs to start yesterday.

I grew up with sheep and crop. Always wanting to be a bovine veterinarian, why I had this goal and dream I don’t know exactly. Things were difficult back then and it was always going to be a challenge of how I was going to fund my education.

When I was 9 we shifted farms to 800 acres of gorse at about 3 metre high, full of drought and light soil. It was a real challenge to help my father break in this country. Done with only a wheel tractor and no large machinery as today. We couldn’t even feed a sheep to the acre at first, it was a tough time of survival.

So you can see I have been on a tractor with my father since I was about 5 years old, lucky the tractor had a seat on the mudguard so I sat there with my dog lassie.

Spending time with Dad I got the smell of soil, not to mention the seagulls bombing us as we had no cab.

As we have moved on in time I cant help notice as I have gotten older, what has happened to our soil. The earthy smell of the healthy soil has gone from us, what used to fill the air with richness, a strong moist smell which once was has now disappeared.

Once investigated, it is now discovered that we have have nearly killed all of our healthy soil, Microbes and Biology that exists within it.

The future farmers must immediately start to take action to reverse this, change things that they have been told to do years ago.

We can not just keep taking, they must be prepared to give back, and most importantly, they must give back what is required.

We have seen irrigation introduced to our light soils and low rainfall areas increasing. These issues need to be managed in a different farming practise to the early days, the introduction of some products needed to be applied in moderation not just poured on. We then had the introduction of spray chemicals which did not do much better.

Along side this the animal health has suffered, as well as human health, Mycotoxins play a big part in what is happening with production and reproduction

We need to think of our future will we succeed or fail if we stay the same. We have nitrate problems to deal with, all at the expense of our health. We need understand the fundamentals as it’s very simple...

Healthy soil - healthy plant - healthy animal to make healthy, profitability!

Written by

David Taylor - Soil Specialist