On Thursday and Friday I drove through the Waikato region [a huge dairy farming area] to Tauranga from Auckland. We have been having the best summer for 50 years. In the middle of the 20th century, we used to get great summers which went on and on, often with droughts, and the need to sit limply around the house with feet in buckets of water, fans blowing, children playing in sprinklers, and maybe a sheet as a cover at night.
We had bucketing rain at the beginning of the year but since then, summer has returned and it has been great. It's about time too. Summers have been brief and barely warm for decades. It has been tempting to abandon NZ as a kind of southern England, with far too much weather to tolerate. That despite NZ being on the same latitude as Morocco.
NZ is brown with just low-lying areas nicely green [due to infinite ground water lurking close to the surface].
Cows are munching hay. There's no growth now.
Fortunately for the grass and farmers, there is a lot more CO2 than there was half a century ago so the amount of water the grass needed to keep going was reduced, so the drought has been delayed in its impact.
It struck me as obvious that two things should be done.
Water should be piped from the enormous Waikato River and spread over the dry farmland and farmers should pump water from a few metres under their farms and spray it onto their grass.
Then, as winter arrives, ground water levels would be reduced and it would take more rain before flooding occurred. The Hauraki Plains were historically regularly flooded, but long flood control embankments have prevented that annual shambles.
NZ has no shortage of water. On the contrary, water is a problem here. Flooding, landslides, impassable roads are regular problems. In winter we get too much, in summer we get not enough. Buffering could be done by using ground water. Drain the ground water in summer and fill it in winter.
Dairy production has been booming in NZ. With the burgeoning world population, and many hungry children to feed, more is needed. I am right now in the process of developing a dairy factory to produce milk powder and infant formula. We can expand production a lot more too. We could convert forestry to cows, sheep farms to cow farms, we could get cows to produce human proteins by genetic engineering, we could swap grass for better cow food.
A new dairy factory is under construction at Pokeno [our one will be at Arapuni]. Another was recently built near Taupo. A UHT plant should now be operational at Maleme Street in Tauranga. Some have been built in the south island.
All the extra CO2 helps with grass growth as well as meaning less water is needed.
No wonder the NZ$ has been soaring.
Mqurice
PS: Unfortunately, it's still not hot enough to grow bananas or other tropical foods. |
