Replacing Canterbury rivers with cows
While the Waipawa River in the Hawke’s Bay quickly disappears because of being over irrigated, it seems Canterbury is exploring ways of irrigating more rivers:
Central Plains Water Trust has applied for a number of resource consents relating to the construction and operation of a large scale irrigation scheme. The applicants propose irrigating 60,000 hectares of land between the Rakaia and Waimakariri Rivers, an area stretching from the Malvern foothills to State Highway One.
The residents (human and otherwise inclined) who live downstream from the rivers on the aquifer of the Canterbury Plains can presumably expect more fertiliser, cow manure and urine in return for less water.
Those upstream don’t all come out better off either.
The scheme will however allow more cows to move into the neighbourhood, which won’t be so good for our environment or green house gas emissions, but great for any industrial cows who were getting lonely.
The latest (2007) estimate of the total cost of the scheme appears to be $N682 million or $6,826 per hectare irrigated.
February 26th, 2008 at 1:21 pm
I bet a pint that in a few years they’ll wake to find…
* the didymo problem is less to do with invasive species
* and more to do with excess nutrients in the water from diary farming practices.
Call it “just a fairly well educated intuition” if you will.
February 26th, 2008 at 9:38 pm
John: Didymo is related to perfectly stable river flows rather than nutrient levels. Dam management, basically, the ribbon rivers look that way because of the rapid changes in level over time that no longer exist.
Plenty of other things spring primarily from nutrient levels though, like the no swimming signs.
Meanwhile, this water scheme is the craziest thing I’ve seen in ages, other than perhaps the “dropping water over the dam to make power to pump the water back up the hill” one. It’s like some people haven’t heard of salination, or the laws of thermodynamics.
February 26th, 2008 at 10:01 pm
I saw the news item on TV3 and from memory it is “Vital for the future of Canterbury”. I think he said “vital”. Sustainability is an issue for everyone .
February 26th, 2008 at 10:04 pm
The Greens (actually the Reds) have been a disaster for the environmental movement.
February 26th, 2008 at 10:20 pm
jh said I saw the news item on TV3 and from memory it is “Vital for the future of Canterbury�.
Hey, I’m not going to let you get away with that one jh. Who said it, when, and preferably link to it.
jh said: The Greens (actually the Reds) have been a disaster for the environmental movement.
Don’t get this jh. Labour, National and the Dunne and Peters personality parties are all totally into economic growth as being paramount. Only the Greens say the environment is paramount, and economic growth must be subservient to environmental sustainability as a policy objective.
Hey, I thought a few posts ago you were with the Greens on this, but now I don’t know, Stop teasing us jh!
February 27th, 2008 at 4:37 am
“”For the long term benefits for the region of course there’s no doubt about it, it should happen, it will happen, if it doesn’t happen now it’ll happen in 20, 50 to 100 years time but at some stage in Canterbury they will store water,” says Pat Morrison, chair of Central Plains Limited.”
http://tvnz.co.nz/view/page/425823/1588240
So perhaps he didn’t say “vital” but the meaning was the same.
On the need for constant economic growth (and never mind the quality), it is true that is the Greens thing, but it doesn’t sit with all the other rubbish, which is the result of a bunch of refugees from the left realising red had no future..
February 27th, 2008 at 12:38 pm
jh - clearly you are suffering from insomnia at the moment, given the hour of this last comment. Perhaps seeing too many reds under your bed? The red label is tired and sooo last century. Can you come up with something a little more up to date and relevant than McCarthy style name calling?
February 27th, 2008 at 5:18 pm
>>The red label is tired and sooo last century
That was kinda his point.
But only the colour of the label has changed….
February 27th, 2008 at 5:55 pm
The “red” label was all about the socialisation of the means of production, distribution and exchange.
Where’s the policy re this with the Greens? Ther is none.
The Greens have even got a market-based carbon credit trading scheme in their policy. And it’s one that doesn’t give a free ride on the taxpayer to the agricultural sector, which is what Labour’s does.
It’s Labour that’s playing games with state subsidies that distort the market, not the Greens.
As for the Nats, remember their innovation of the Accommodation Supplement? This is essentially a huge state subsidy to landlords that no party (including the Greens) has worked out a way to get rid of.
It’s a millstone around the neck of any future Government, because it artificially inflates residential rents and therefore property prices, but abolishing it would result in unacceptable hardship for residential tenants.
So, BluePeter and JH, who’s really “red” at the end of the day?
February 27th, 2008 at 9:04 pm
The red label is about Marxism: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need”. The socialisation of the means of production, distribution and exchange could be seen as a consequence of that idea.
February 27th, 2008 at 9:24 pm
BluePeter said: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need�.
I don’t see a problem with that BP.
The converse is that people who are are able can slack aroung and bludge off the State, while people who through impairment or domestic circumstance have no capacity to earn or contribute to society live a life of poverty.
Don’t dismiss it as “red” just because Karl Marx wrote it - we have a lot to learn from Marx, just as we do from right wing economists and philosophers.
Being Green is taking the best bits from many economic theories, and putting them into the context of finite resources.
None of Marx, Keynes, Adam Smith or Hayek understood that bit, because in their times it was presumed there were infinite resources, and that is the underlying axiom each of their economic theories are based on.
As Greens we need to move on and develop new economic theory based on finite resources. But that doesn’t mean rejecting all of the principles expounded by economic theorists of the past, including Marx.
February 28th, 2008 at 1:53 am
“From each according to his ability, to each according to his needâ€?. isn’t Marx, it’s Paris commune. Egalite (with one of those thingamebobs over the e), or egalitarianism if you’re not into Gallic flair.
Something Labour is very selective about, especially when Auckland has the ability rather than the need. Then the concept of egality goes out the window.
The problem with socialisation of the means of production, distribution and exchange is that the state apparatus and politicians very quickly replace socialisation with nationalisation and complete reverse Marx’s intention that socialism makes the state reduntant.
Or at least that’s my understanding of the Communist Manifesto. I stopped reading Das Kapital when I encountered the absurd assumption that labour is the only way value is added. How someone with enough brains to understand the rest of capitalsim couldn’t recognise the value added by invention is beyond me. Perhaps he wasn’t brave enough to tackle multiple basis for capitalism, such as brawn, brain and bravery.
February 28th, 2008 at 10:55 am
Back to the point. Canterbury has had run-of-river extraction for irrigation since the late 1870’s. Race intakes exist on the Kowai, the Waimak (several), and around from Windwhistle, and a network of 900+km of open races distributes the feed. These races still run today, and provided the Canterbury Plains with much of its early farming capacity. The Central Plains Scheme is a store-on-flood concept rather than a run-of-river, and as river flows in both the Waimak and Rakaia can top 3000 cumecs in heavy floods, there is considerable scope for this water-conservation action.
So rather than the throwaway line ‘replacing rivers with cows’, perhaps a more measured and historically-minded approach to the topic is needed. There can be no question about the rivers being ‘replaced’, after all. They’re well away from the presently watered farmland, and there is 140 years’ experience in running these schemes.
Think globally, act locally. But fer Gaia’s sake, bone up on the local topography first….
February 29th, 2008 at 1:18 am
waymad, the type of water races you mention run alongside the highway west of Culverden. The ones that are planned for CPW are slightly smaller than the hydro canals in the MacKenzie Basin. CPW is a combined store-on-flood and run-of-river scheme.
According to CPWL “A headrace canal will channel water for 56km from intakes in the Waimakariri and Rakaia riverbeds. Water within the canal will be about 5m deep and 30m wide at the surface.”
“Very little water will be taken when rivers approach peak flood levels, as it would mean the scheme has to dispose of large volumes of sediment.”
“neither ‘take’ will be continuous and represent the maximum amount of water that the scheme could take at any one time. When either river is in a period of low flow, no water will be taken below the established minimum low flow.”
http://www.cpwl.co.nz/technical/technical-elements.html
February 29th, 2008 at 4:57 pm
Somewhere in my reading last year, possibly in the book “When the Rivers Run Dry”, there was mention of the fact that dams loose a large amount of what was stored water to evaporation & following on that theme, the author made similar comments about open canals & irrigation streams.
Any hydrologists out there who can comment on these points?
March 2nd, 2008 at 1:51 pm
I think one of the main problems with the scheme is the application for the use of the Public Works Act by a private corporation to forcibly remove farmers from their farms.
Vital for whom? Sustainable for what? With 1200 objections to it, it does not seem as though the locals are enthusiastic about either the scheme or the manner of its implementation.
Apart from the dubious nature of the scheme itself, the precedent this will set is appalling.
March 2nd, 2008 at 3:20 pm
I hear alarm bells when they say:
“Very little water will be taken when rivers approach peak flood levels, as it would mean the scheme has to dispose of large volumes of sediment.�
That means that the sediment stays in the existing river, but there is reduced flow in that river at other times to wash the sediment down and out to sea. Therefore there may be a risk of sediment build-up in the existing river and associated increased flooding in and around the existing river.
I hope their impact assessments have looked into this.
Trevor.