WATER SUPPLY FOR THE DOWNLANDS

Timaru Herald, Volume CXL, Issue 20260, 8 November 1935, Page 13

WATER SUPPLY FOR THE DOWNLANDS

To the Editor of " The Timaru Herald ” Sir, —I crave your indulgence again to answer some of the childish questions Mr A. H. Roberts has asked me, as an excuse for filching the water of the Te Ngawai river, and thereby spoiling a national asset in the interest of a few tired farmers who do not know enough to keep their cows from leaving their dung in their own pond water supplies. The difference between the desert and the sown is a willing farmer and a long handled shovel, and as we look round some of the farmers’ ponds or dams, we see old car tyres, kerosene tins, worn out boots and a miscellaneous collection of discarded household goods littering up the pond, whilst Daisy walks up to her udder in water. The fault is not with the pond, or the cow that walks in the water, but with the person that is in control of them. Mr Roberts should fence his ponds and push a pipe through the pond wall, lead it to a water trough, put a cistern in the trough to conserve the flow. Lime or perch will kill red worms and liver fluke. Lime will benefit both man and beast, and if this will not conserve enough water to keep it sweet, the farmer should put in a lot of fine sand and shingle in the dam and filter the water through this, to the trough. Sweep out the spoutings, filter the water into tanks and out of them, add a block of lime to the water. There is just as little excuse for dirt as there is for filching the Te Ngawai’s water. Mr Roberts derives much pleasure in describing the Te Ngawai’s waters. He says the water dives beneath the boulders near Albury to come up again at the Cave; leaving a track like the old caravan routes of the Sahara, which are described as littered with bones. Correct, Mr Roberts Sahara dry caravan routes, and he now advocates a further reduction of this river’s supply, to improve a Sahara. Now, sir, here we have an effect —a drying up of our rain river beds—that once held a copious supply of water all the year round. Why do they now duck and dive amongst fhe gravel, that they used to carry to the sea. The cause, I will be pleased to explain in a child’s story of the ruination of our watersheds for the benefit of those that are not acquainted with the study of potomology or the study of running water. Sixty years ago, all our rain rivers carried their shingle seawards and to the sea.

Take any of our Canterbury rain rivers, the Pareora first. Mr Brookland, who owned and farmed the lands where the Pareora freezing works now stand, required no fences on the river banks to keep his cows and cattle from crossing this river bed, the volume of water was better than a fence. Look at it to-day, and for nine or ten months of the year there is hardly enough water there to give cattle a drink. The Opihi at this time required a boat to cross it at almost all seasons of the year in its lower waters. To-day the wee schoolboys paddle across its ripples any where in the summer time. I said, let us take any river. The Ashley river below Rangiora, to be correct at Waikuku, had a ferry boat in those days. This ferry was kept by the Orchard brothers, on the same site as the Main North Road bridge stands today. But to-day the Sahara is there, and instead of a ferry, we have a bridge, that for nine months of the year, spans a trickle of water, that would not wet the uppers of anyone’s boots crossing the ripples. Need I mention the Waiho, Te Mona, Orari, Waihi, Hinds, Ashburton, Selwyn, Hororata? But why go on? They have all been beaten and flailed out by the same stick. In the wake of the dry river bed, comes the costly burden of groynes and worse still the land on the river banks, and the hill soils being sluiced away to the sea. I saw and perhaps you read about Mr Morrison’s garage and some of his cars being trundled into the Waihi at Geraldine by erosion. Every rain river bed depleted of its buffers, a full flowing waterway, has these problems. Take our floods of a few years ago—railway traffic stopped at St. Andrews, washed out bridges at Cannington, Brassel’s bridge left standing in a Sahara, with the end approaches gone. Kakahu bridges in a like predicament. The Temuka main bridge a switchback affair, and scores of men groyning and filling in the approach .-to the Opihi bridge at

Arowhenua. Erosion of our plains lands, the smashing of our traffic bridges, costly groynes that are only of momentary value, there to-day; washed under to-morrow. The filling up of our river beds with shingle, that only flood water can surmount; shingle that only washes from one site to another; the lean side taking the slush of flood waters and the groynes bursting the flow to the other bank next trip, but erosion goes on all the time. These are the results of our man-made Saharas. Across our ranges, where our rain rivers are born, a plague of woolly locusts, backed up by man with axe and fire, have stripped the verdure from our fair lands. Millions of sheep trotters have padded the clays hard, and cut up the surface soils, that took ages to put there, so that when a twoinch fall of rain showers down, away goes the soil to the sea. There is nothing left to hold up and trickle this rainfall slowly down. The result is all the accompanying evils. In the old days a flood used to last in our rain rivers up to six weeks, the same flood waters now last about six days. The other week, Mr Burnett told us that these hills would not carry the number of sheep they did thirty years ago, and the Crown tenants have got a reduction of rent. I was plways told that “as you make your be 4 so shall you lie,” but it sems in this caje, that the destroyers are helped, while at the same time one million sheep are lost in New Zealand annually, of which there is no accounting for. All this in spite of the Massey and Lincoln Colleges, farmers’ lecture clubs, and talks on land every other night, by the wireless lecturers. Shades of Michael John Burke with his “plant forest trees for your lives.” Methinks I can see him meditating on the destruction of our hill soils by over-stocking, and the ruin of our hill terraces by ploughing and cropping, bled to the death; where sorrel and blue forget-me-not crops testify to the awful ignorance, and avaricious greed of man; broken hill faces, outcrops of bare clay, new water channels and running faces, backed up by gorse, cats, hawks, German owls, stoats, weasles, hedgehogs and strychnine. All these backed up by dry river beds, Saharas, Mr Roberts calls them. How long? How long? Mr Roberts sneers at the tourists and the hotel-keepers. Here to-day, away to-morrow-kind, he calls them. Of the New Zealand tourists there are two kinds, the flitting farmers and Mr Roberts’s kind —here to-day and away to-morrow. In one year before the slump, this kind romped through New Zealand, ate our mutton and. took a pocketful of scenery with them, and left nearly a million and a half of money, This helped to pay free railage on lime, also free railage for our school children, and chsap fare fodder from Southland during the last dry spell: Now the other kind —the flitting farmer on two or three farms a year—left close on a million and a quarter pounds in the land and estate men’s hands in one year. Back this up with £14,000,000 of soldier unsettlements lands. The latter items not only boosted up lands which left a trail of other millions which to-day, on a flat market, leaves the farmer in the hands of the mortgagee, and to-day Mr Burnett comes along with this last straw to save—whom? 2/- or 2/6 an acre water rates is going to be the farmers’ salvation! If they can pay it, it is more than the other farmers can do and legislation has just been pushed through to see that John Government gets his pound of flesh. I mean the pipe line and labour costs. Conservation of the rainfall in our watersheds by the farmers, themselves is the best and cheapest form of water supply, and it is high time we preached and practised this to them, instead of leading them further into debt. Our rain rivers will come back to their full flow’, and our coimty engineers who are like Sysiphus of old, will rest at the foot of the hill instead of the everlasting heaving up of his boulders, bridges, and groynes.—l am, etc.,

A LOVER OF NATURE. Timaru. November 6.