Nitrate Vulnerable Purbeck and ....
.......... Paperwork Paperwork Paperwork!
Poole Harbour is a beautiful place.
The second largest natural harbour in the
world, even if it is only an average of 18 inches deep. The muddy creeks
and lagoons team with little invertebrates that provide food for a mass
of wildlife.
To the South, West and North the farms of the Purbecks run down to its
shores... but on the eastern side is Poole.
And there's the rub. The waters of Poole Harbour have become eutrophic.
The reason for this, in my view, is the historical inadequacy of Poole's sewage works to remove the nutrients from the waste, so that in the past, when it rained, the water company unable to cope with the volume were licensed to allow the excess to flow straight into Poole Harbour. This was not entirely their fault, many surface water drains had been illegally piped into the sewage system.
This nutrient rich (eutrophic) soup full of nitrates and phosphates promotes the growth of bacteria and algae that can strip oxygen from the water. Lack of oxygen can cause the death of many other life forms, such as fish, shrimps and molluscs that live in the water; not a great state of affairs.
The government response was not only to target the water company, but also to create Nitrate Vulnerable Zones (NVZs) along the banks and water catchment areas of the streams and rivers running into Poole Harbour, such as the Piddle and Frome.
It does not matter if you farm alongside a river such as
the Sherford which is so clean as to be almost potable, you still get swept
up into an NVZ.
So that puts almost half of farms in the island of Purbeck into an NVZ.
The aims of the zones are thoroughly laudable. Farmers should not be spreading slurry (animal poo) anywhere near streams and watercourses. They should not be spreading fertiliser over the tops of river banks. They should not be polluting. It challenges farmers to make the best use of fertilisers.
DEFRA has very kindly provided farmers with a document, some 170 pages long, giving details of the records, maps and paperwork that farmers are now required to produce - and keep for five years - in order to prove (or is it disprove?) a negative. For instance, we have to add up the amount of slurry produced by each animal on the farm and prove where it is stored and spread. Thankfully, we do not had to do this for all the wild animals, deer, squirrels, swans or rabbits, maybe that will come in the next DEFRA document.
Next month, I promise to tell you about the memories that
Jeff Lander's
whelks have invoked in me, and not moan about the way we have to prove how
we protect the environment.
EDITOR'S NOTES (not all of which should be taken at face value) :
◊ "potable" means fit for drinking
◊ DEFRA is the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs: a bunch of
kind civil servants, one of whose tasks is to ensure that every farmer spends more
and more time sitting comfortably in his office dealing with mountains of
paperwork, and correspondingly less time attending to the boring
(and, let's face it, far less important) task of caring for his land and animals(!)
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