Whanganui letters: Māori wards, regenerative farming and weight restrictions on our roads

Cropping deletes soil of carbon, worms and soil bacteria, a reader says. Photo / File

Māori wards
Ray Brightwell's ... letter regarding Māori wards (Chronicle, February 20) deserves to be in The New Real History of New Zealand as exemplar of diehard colonialist attitudes.

It flies in the face of the purported spirit of the Treaty of Waitangi and is in my opinion an utter disgrace.

This is not what the ratepayers' association should stand for. [Abridged]

L E FITTON
Whanganui

Regenerative farming

Dr Gwen Grelat's white paper on regenerative farming, appears, on the basis of this article, to be not worth reading, a lot of words telling us nothing.

Cropping deletes soil of carbon, worms and soil bacteria. After four or five years it needs to be put back into grass farming for 10 years or so, to allow the ruminants to restock the soil with carbon, which the grass has removed from the atmosphere. This also gives worms and bacteria an undisturbed chance to establish themselves in the soil to take any rotting lower leaves of grass into the soil, which raises the humus levels. Humus allows bacteria to thrive. High-humus soil retains moisture and minerals, phosphate and nitrogen.

Over the past few hundred thousands of years, ruminants have turned this planet into the fertile place it is. We need more ruminants, less trees, they build a carbon sink in the ground not in a trunk, which has to fall to the ground and rot to achieve that.

GARTH SCOWN
Whanganui

Weight restrictions

If the Whanganui District Council can put weight restrictions on the Dublin St Bridge, why not the Denlair Rd? (Chronicle, February 27)

BOB HARRIS
Whanganui

Click here to email us a letter.