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Some farmers in the Eastern Waikato are still installing porous drainage pipes into wet areas when they should be banned by Environment Waikato.
Underground drainage doesn’t work until the soil is wet, after which water soluble fertilisers and effluent leach with the water. These then pollute waterways and waste farmers' money. When rain pours down, surface drainage prevents pugging much better than sub-surface drainage which doesn’t work until the soil is over-wet, and surface drains last forever with little maintenance. Surface drainage is much cheaper to install with a spinner digger or with V drains made with a grader blade. These take heavy rainfall away as clean non-polluting water and can be positioned to tap wet weather springs at the bottoms of hills that cause moisture loving weeds to thrive. Although spinner ditchers were invented and written about 50 years ago and can be seen in www.farmers-tips.com under Soils > Drainage, some farmers still don’t know about them. An Environment Waikato staff member told me that he gets complaints from farmers who see brown polluted water coming out of Novaflo after their neighbour had spread effluent over them. This can result in a fine. This also shows that some are spreading effluent too thickly which is a waste to be avoided. Effluent spreading irrigators must be able to travel fast enough to not pollute. See Soils > Drainage. |