Fertilizer from the sky does serious damage
By James Steidle
Cows found dead after helicopters spray area.
If you were out hunting this week around Prince George and Quesnel you probably heard the annoying buzz of helicopters spraying many dozens of semi-trucks worth of fertilizer on our forests.
For at least 11 unlucky cattle east of Quesnel, this was no mere nuisance, but it may have been their death sentence.
Speaking with the affected rancher, I was told this wasn’t so much a pile of spilled fertilizer but fertilizer that had dissolved in rain, had collected in a puddle, and which the cattle drank. This happened at two different loading locations.
One disturbing photo of dead cattle was from one fill locations, where six cattle died, while two more cattle were found dead at another fill site and the remainder found nearby.
If these cattle and wildlife died from fertilizer poisoning, it does not appear to be a one-off.
Investigating loading locations by Punchaw Lake on Monday, Oct. 5, I noticed two sections of Clarkson Road were tinted blue with fertilizer pellets. A little rain could easily concentrate this into an irresistible puddle for wildlife to drink from.
It doesn’t take much fertilizer to kill ungulates, and when you are spraying this stuff on tens of thousands of hectares at around 435 kg per hectare, I don’t think these cattle are the first victims of this program.
Toads and amphibians, for starters, are highly sensitive to forestry fertilizing.
I walked through a fertilizer-sprayed plantation and there were pellets uniformly scattered through the understory. I don’t think toads, snails, and other amphibians not to mention insects could avoid contacting their skin with it.
Chickens will also eat fertilizer and rapidly expire. I have no idea whether grouse will eat them and I have seen no BC research asking this.
This program has been happening for decades. It has recently been rolled into a roughly $100 million a year program called the Forest Investment Program.
This program is supposed to “enhance forest resiliency, mitigate climate change, and restore ecosystems and wildlife habitat.”
A big claim of this program, and its defenders, is that this is all about greenhouse gas mitigation. If we fertilize the forests, the trees will grow faster, and they will sequester more carbon.
It’s a clever argument.
In the past, arguments were made that we should make the corporations pay for forest fertilizing, since they would be the ones benefiting from the expense.
It’s still a legitimate argument. We aren’t fertilizing parks. We are fertilizing industrial plantations and if we are making them grow quicker, the annual allowable cut can go up.
I guess with climate change on the table, we aren’t supposed to be asking how our government takes money in a time of record deficits to enhance corporate profits. That would be rude.
But when you examine other details of the program, things start to look fishy.
This same program, ironically, has spent many millions of dollars eliminating aspen and birch from the plantations, including in the past few years.
Aspen and birch, of course, are known to sequester the many times more carbon than other boreal conifer species, have higher resistance to wildfires, and have an albedo nearly double that of conifers.
If the Forest Investment Program cared about climate change, why are they cutting down perfectly good aspen trees sequestering the most carbon, absorbing the least amount of solar radiation, and mitigating the most wildfire?
And not only that, those aspen, birch, cottonwood and alders fertilize our forests for free. In 2022 research was published showing that having broadleaf mixtures in your conifer plantations increased nitrogen and improved stand productivity.
An interesting study in Oregon showed that a red-alder fire-break experiment at Wind River grew douglas fir better than the plantations where the red alder had been eliminated.
A lot of this probably has to do with what BC-born forest scientist Suzanne Simard discovered: trees like birch support funghi called mycorrhizae that benefit conifer trees like douglas fir. And adding chemical fertilizer doesn’t seem to do great things for these free funghi fertilizers either. Research out of Scandinavia shows that the ectomycorrhizae that help pine are negatively impacted by fertilizer applications.
As taxpayers it goes without saying we always need to scrutinize government.
This Forest Investment Program and this forestry fertilizing is a great example of something of dubious value that we could do for free if we simply got out of nature’s way.
The only problem with that is that nature doesn’t employ bureaucrats.
Columnist James Steidle is a founder of Stop the Spray BC.
Originally published at princegeorgecitizen.com
