Bullshit Billboards -- December 2018

As you travel north into Ashburton you are greeted by a stark black billboard with large white lettering making a very bold claim: Ravensdown & Ballance Pollute Rivers.

The billboard is in a 50km zone so your passenger may even get the chance to read the hashtag in the bottom left hand corner, #TooManyCows, and see Greenpeace’s distinct logo in the bottom right.

Shortly after passing the billboard you’ll drive over the bridge that spans the Ashburton River and through a flock of wheeling and squawking gulls in a scene reminiscent of the rubbish dumps of my childhood. You could take this opportunity to explain to your travelling companion that the guano from the thousands of gulls nesting in the braided river below is as thick as the irony contained in the billboard’s simplistic message.

You see, from State Highway 1 to the ocean it’s those native seagulls that are polluting our river, not a fertiliser company. There’s not as many nesting this year as have in the past, only an estimated 8000, but that’s still equivalent to 4000 cows pumping E.Coli into the river every single day.

That’s right, two seagulls excrete as much E.Coli per day as a single dairy cow, which is still far preferable to ducks, a single one of which poops out nearly 16 times as many of the nasty organisms daily as a cow does.

Up river you can still happily and safely swim, but once you reach the colony of seagulls the danger of getting sick becomes very real.

I guess NATIVE SEAGULLS ARE POLLUTING RIVERS wouldn’t cause the type of outrage their disingenuous offering is hoping for.

After you’ve explained this to your passenger they might turn to you and say “Don’t be silly, the billboard is obviously referring to nitrogen and not pathogens”.

Once you’re over the bridge you’ve got three sets of traffic lights to explain to them that nitrogenous fertiliser isn’t the main source of N leaching on dairy farms, it’s cow urine, and the cow doesn’t care whether the source on nitrogen is organic chicken poo, fixed from the atmosphere by legumes or applied by a truck: it’s still going to get ingested and excreted.

Further, your passenger might like to know that every farm in Canterbury has to submit an environmental plan and a nutrient budget to the regional council, and not only is the amount of nitrogen leached from their systems capped it is expected to fall and it’s audited annually to ensure it does. Ballance and Ravensdown are doing everything they can to help farmers achieve this.

“But too many cows!” your passenger sputters.

“Did you know that market gardens can leach three times the nitrate of the average dairy farm”, you say as you pull over, giving them something to ponder on their long walk to Christchurch.