Bruce Bisset: Wow, look at all the colours

Bruce Bisset

Perhaps it was the spectral colour of the blood moon on Wednesday that got me thinking about the unnatural tints we see in our supposedly clean green landscape these days, particularly rust-brown and bright orange across fallow fields.

It's only a few weeks since such startling swathes of desertification seemed everywhere along the road through central Hawke's Bay, making one wonder whether parts of Mars had mysteriously been transplanted to Earth.

And then, miraculously, a week or so later the parched, apparently dead, soil was suddenly a wash of green as a variety of crops sprang up, all of them ultimately destined for human consumption — although some will have passed through an animal first.

The cause of this phenomena was agrichemicals, of course. With the orange residue of glyphosate (the active ingredient in Roundup) visually most prominent amongst them.

Given we are what we eat, if such stultifying sights are not enough to start to question the methodology of modern agriculture, consider that what you can see is only the very tip of the iceberg lettuce.

The latest in an agrichemical manual, out this month, contains a veritable laboratory of herbicides, pesticides, fungicides, adjuvants, and more besides; 900 pages crammed full of every type of agrichemical you could wish for.

Nine hundred pages!

An adjuvant, by the way, is an additive that makes the main chemical behave in a certain way: shaping the droplet size or enhancing the penetration or otherwise improving the way it is applied and taken up, depending on the species being targeted.

Oh, it's technical alright. You can also find purveyors of testing regimes used to determine if the stuff you've used before still works or if your fields have grown resistant and you now need something stronger.

Though they don't say what happens when you've used everything you can and nothing works any more.

A chap connected with an environmental award got very hot under the collar with me late last year when I pointed out this "traditional" chemical farming as practised in New Zealand was a dead-end street, and we should instead be filling the premium organic niche.

At first I had trouble believing the reaction from someone supposedly environmentally aware. Then I looked at who the sponsor of the awards was. Yep. A chemical company.

This is how insidious it is.

It's not just arable land; liberal application of a number of weedkillers on deforested land is common practice prior to new tree plantings. So these substances don't only douse the food we eat; they're everywhere, very much including your street frontage, parks, and most home gardens.

Frankly it makes the dropping of 1080 in forests to control animal pests pale in comparison. But let's add that in there too.

Overseas visitors are starting to call us out on this, which in turn — as if the parlous state of our waterways wasn't enough — is starting to seriously harm our reputation as "clean and green".

But big chemical companies love NZ because collectively we have an addictive personality: we rush to get the next best thing, and decades later, when the world has woken up to how toxic it is, we're still happily spraying.

And while we're busy looking for our next fix, the organic bus is heading off to market without us.

■Bruce Bisset is a freelance writer and poet.
■Views expressed here are the writer's opinion and not the newspaper's.