New Zealand: Billion-Dollar Soils Washing Into Rivers
April 19th, 2018Via: Newsroom:
We’re losing soil at an alarming rate, but there are some gaping holes in our knowledge about why and where from, reports Eloise Gibson
You can’t grow a lot of food without soil, certainly not in a dairy-, wine- and vege-hungry nation like New Zealand.
Yet dirt – the foundation of our food supply – is being washed down our rivers and into the ocean at a worrying rate.
The latest report from the Ministry for the Environment and Statistics NZ, Our Land 2018, says New Zealand is losing about 192 million tonnes of soil a year.
At that rate, we’re contributing about 1.7 percent of all the sediment lost globally, despite having just 0.2 percent of the world’s land area.
Much of that is coming from underneath grassy farm paddocks, which are shedding 44 percent or 84 million tons of the lost soil into rivers.
