Alastair Brickell wrote a great piece in The Informer Issue 1194. He is absolutely correct that given time, the western half of the Coromandel Peninsula is going to finish up in the Hauraki Gulf and the eastern half in the Pacific Ocean. Already on the western side of the Peninsula at low tide, wide fans of silt can be seen at the outlets of the many streams carrying the hills into the sea, slowly forming an extended land area.
DRAINAGE AND INVENTIONS
In 1952 my father bought 200ha of virgin peat land, no fences and no drains. Our family could not farm without drains; we could not grow grass in water. A farmer on the Hauraki Plains, Murdoch Carter had designed a basic implement.it was a large beam with an angle wing at about 30 degrees. Just plough a big furrow with a swamp plough and drag this Carter Drainer along would get you a basic shallow drain. Progress was made to a back blade on a crawler tractor, and we were able to dig in the soft peat a much deeper open drain and more importantly, maintain the said drain more efficiently at up to 200metres an hour.
Then we saw an implement at a Field Day, and it gave us an idea. We built yet another drainage machine. This machine enabled both digging and maintenance, including spreading the material at not 200 metres an hour, but up to 800 metres in 40minutes.
This won me first prize in the Farmer Invention Award in 1974. Do not get too carried awa; it can only maintain up to 1.5 metres deep. I still have one of these machines if anybody wants to view it. When leaving the property we had arrived at in 1952, we had gone from no drains to 20 kms of open drains. It was important to maintain the drains at least every second year.
Ignorance and laziness
This is where the laziness speaks and I call the culprits- ‘twits’.
“It is much cheaper to spray and poison the weeds, than mechanically open the ditch,” they said.
So now there is a supposed drainage outlet, clogged with poisoned debris deliberately impeding the water flow, able at times to block culverts and as at Waihi in the most recent deluge, weeds so extensive they have matted up about a hundred metres of fence and flattened that too.
Water is one thing, but water and rubbish is a totally different ball game.
Look at the people at Te Araroa surrounded by debris in some place up to two metres deep and not the first time either. A whiff of Roundup will never fix that situation. Somebody will have to get in there and move the trash, something people did, before the criminal RMA. Now we have the mad situation where local government staff are in control of their relevant authority and at the same time, they are afraid of making a decision (even if they thought they knew how), until they have a Resource Consent. Experience and drainage knowledge is out the door in favour of fairyland bureaucracy.
To be continued.
