Habsburg Empire or free farmers?
I would like to add a couple of comments to Mr. Devon Cooke’s letter to the editor on page 12 of the March 16 issue of The Western Producer regarding the “big farmland investors.”
We are small hay and grain producers in the South Peace River area of British Columbia. I grew up in Switzerland and would like to give you an insight on what happened there in the 13th century. The Habsburg controlled all the land, so there were only peasants. The peasants got organized and chased the Habsburg back to Austria, and Switzerland became a country in 1291.
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My question is this: if present law makers have children that are interested in farming, would they wish their children to farm under a Habsburg regime or be in control of their own destiny?
Walter J. Fritsche,
Dawson Creek, B. C.
What’s all the fuss about nitrous oxide?
Thank you to Robert Arnason of The Western Producer’s Winnipeg bureau for his recent thoughtful and very appropriate article concerning fertilizer emissions of nitrous oxide on page 43 of the Feb. 9 issue.
His point was that the federal government’s plan to reduce emissions from fertilizer by 30 percent by 2030 leaves us with two widely divided views that prevent any consensus.
The scientific literature dealing with N2O is huge. It has been a topic of interest since the days of the hole in the ozone layer. The literature shows clearly that N2O loss is driven by water and that it can come from many sources, including plant residues and nitrate from manure and alfalfa breaking.
The N2O losses are typically measured in grams per hectare. The N2O emissions from fertilizer can be reduced by 50 percent by additions of nitrification of urease inhibitors to fertilizer. However, 50 percent of almost nothing is still almost nothing.
The big “kicker” is what the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had to say about historic N2O levels in the atmosphere. The IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, Summary for Policy Makers, has this to say about N2O:
“ Since 1750 … increases in N2O (23 percent) are similar to the natural multi-millennial changes between glacial and interglacial periods over at least the past 800,000 years (very high confidence)”.
So, why all the fuss about N2O from fertilizer?
J.L. (Les) Henry,
professor emeritus, soil science,
University of Saskatchewan
