4 February 1997 Putting the science into sustainability

Helping put science into the concept of sustainable agriculture is Lincoln University's Professor Steve Wratten of the Department of Entomology and Animal Ecology.

Professor Wratten enthuses over the job, believing that environmental thinkers and emotionalists have pushed sustainability too far ahead of the science, and too quickly.

"There's urgent catching up to be done," he says.

"The concepts of sustainability, low pollution and clean, green farming in New Zealand are part of modern culture in this country but rigorous tests of these ideas are still a rarity."

He understands exactly the frustration of New Zealand's Federated Farmers President Malcolm Bailey who says of sustainability – "great idea, no sensible farmer would disagree, but tell us how to do it so we can make our dollar. Farmers are, after all, businessmen".

"Thanks to funding support from commercial sources plus collaborative support from Crown Research Institutes and other scientific institutions, that's exactly what we are now endeavouring to do," answers Professor Wratten.

"But of course the first step has to be a definition of terms and an assessment of the situation. For example, what exactly is a sustainable approach to food production and agriculture?

"Adapting a definition from the World Commission on Environment and Development you can say that sustainable agriculture is agriculture which meets the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

"Those needs of future generations can be compromised by degrading soils, contaminating growing and grazing environments, destroying links in the various 'natural chains' such as the water cycle and the nutrient cycle, and poisoning the atmosphere with excessive levels of undesirable gases.

"However, before we can start to do anything about these and sensibly measure the results of remedial action we have to know how bad, or even how good, the situation is to start with," says Professor Wratten.

"For example, some farmers will be farming very sustainably already – for them stewardship of the land goes with the farming ethic – but others, either wittingly or unwittingly, will be doing just the opposite."

The first step in this assessment and measurement process is underway now. It is called the Selwyn Stewardship Monitoring Scheme and its importance cannot be over-emphasised.

"There is no history of long-term monitoring work in New Zealand related to the concept of sustainability and that makes the scheme here in Canterbury very important," says Professor Wratten. "In fact it heralds the start of an important era in New Zealand sustainability work.

"Through it we have the opportunity to show our national and especially our international customers that we can produce what is wanted as well as what is needed, that we can provide agricultural products with the environmental 'added value' of having been produced in a sustainable way."

The Selwyn Stewardship Monitoring Scheme (Selwyn for the district in which it is operating) was initiated in 1994 by the Ministry of Agriculture Policy Division and Agriculture New Zealand and from the outset Lincoln University has been involved along with the farming community around Leeston (20kms south of Lincoln University), Ellesmere College and several Crown Research Institutes.

After finding representative farms on which long-term work could be carried out, a steering committee developed a list of realistic and ecologically meaningful indicators which could be used to determine the presence or otherwise of ‘sustainability’.

This list was refined and now stands as a set of ‘core indicators’ for land, air and fresh water and it includes soil structure and nutrient levels, crop yields, weed/seed populations, plant disease levels, and contaminants in fresh water and the effects of these on aquatic invertebrates.

On land, populations of earthworms, springtails and predatory insects in or on the soil plus populations of skylarks are being monitored.

Twelve paddocks are involved in the study, covering three types of farming operation – sheep/beef, dairying and cropping – and already some dramatic differences have shown up, for example an absence of worms on some of the cropping paddocks but flourishing populations on the dairying fields.

The Selwyn scheme is in its early days but is gathering an increasingly high profile and has been well funded and supported.

"The scheme will provide us with a baseline of information about sustainability and sustainable practices which we haven't got in New Zealand at this stage," says Professor Wratten.

"It will confirm for us a number of key environmental indicators for defining the relationship between farming practices and specific environmental outcomes and will thus allow our future practices to stand up to 'scientific scrutiny', giving credibility to marketplace claims about our food products being 'clean and green'."

While the urgent work of baseline assessment and measurement is proceeding under the Selwyn Stewardship Monitoring Scheme, Professor Wratten and colleagues at Lincoln University are also busy researching and promoting various mechanisms and techniques for enhancing sustainability – the ‘how-to-do-it’ aspect.

Techniques such as integrated pest management (the term for pest control using a combination of strategies – some chemical, some biological) and managed diversity (the term for introducing a balanced array of plant and insect life into a growing environment) are being researched, practised and proselytized.

"Seminars, field days, talks and demonstrations to farmers, we're doing them all the time," says Professor Wratten. "And of course, most importantly for an educational institution, we reach out to industry through the graduates who pass through our hands and into the workforce. It's no coincidence that some of the key players already active in the commercial organic and sustainable agriculture world are Lincoln graduates."