NOVEMBER 2016 • COUNTRY LIFE IN BC Making a case for biosolids on interior ranches


Controversial use of treated waste shows positive impact on grasslands Stories by TOM WALKER


CLINTON – Stepping out of the truck, I think to myself that these south Cariboo grasslands don’t look very grassy. Parched, crumbly soil shows between small clumps of grass that are barely as high as my hiking boots. I’m not looking at the towering bunch grass I remember 40 years ago as I headed south from Kamloops through Knutsford on my first trip to Merritt. It isn’t from lack of rainfall. Area ranchers I’m talking to tell me it’s been one of the wettest summers they can recall. Indeed, about 30 meters away, the grass is thick and green, not quite the “belly high to a horse” of legends, but perhaps knee high and high enough that it’s falling over in the late September sunshine. There is a thick thatch layer, native grasses crowd out the weeds, and the soil is dark and rich-looking. Same land, same rainfall. What’s the difference? The lush green patch is a demonstration plot that has been treated with biosolids from the Lower Mainland.


Lawrence Joiner speaks in a soft tone as he describes the soil on his 5,000-hectare deeded rangelands.


“When the ministry range agrologist tested it, the results came back: no nitrogen, no organic matter,” says Joiner as he addresses a tour of his OK Ranch restoration project. “I came up from the coast so I was used to putting chicken manure on the grass to make it grow.”


He says he tried chicken manure and cow manure and chemical fertilizers but nothing helped. “Let it rest, said the agrologist, and I did,” says Joiner. “But it didn’t improve.”


Overdrawn


“You can think of the soil as a bank,” explains John Lavery, an agrologist and biologist who works with SYLVIS Environmental. “At some point, the bank became over drawn.”


There’s talk of over-grazing and the effects of the drought in the 1930’s. This area west of Clinton up against the Fraser


See BIOSOLIDS page 34


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John Lavery from SYLVIS Environmental provides a hands-on demonstration of biosolid material being used to fertilize grassland in BC’s southern interior. (Tom Walker photo)


Saving rural areas from urban sludge


MERRITT – Don Vincent has a small farm 25 km west of Merritt where he has planted two acres of fruhburgunder, a cool-climate German variety of the pinot noir grape. He is an instructor at the Nicola Valley Institute of Technology, a post secondary institution governed by the aboriginal community. And he is a member of Friends of the Nicola Valley, a group opposed to the spreading of biosolids in the Cariboo Grasslands restoration project. “SYLVIS and the local ranchers are carrying out experiments using the big city’s sewer sludge as fertilizer,” says Vincent. He says his group doesn’t accept the name biosolids. “About a decade ago, a PR machine went into high gear to formulate a nice sounding word. They came up with biosolids ... We see that as a term that has been cooked up and it is not a scientific term.”


Vincent says he hasn’t been up to the grasslands sight.


“They cancelled the information day that I think was just a propaganda piece when they found out that people with a lot of information, like scientist John Werring from the Suzuki Foundation, were going to come up and ask some awkward questions,” he says. Vincent dismissed a four-year study vetted by Ryerson University scientist Lynda McCarthy.


“I see it as nothing more than a cherry- picked summary of articles that supports the government and the industrys’ pre- determined outcomes,” Vincent says. “They made sure that they only chose the science


that supports their claims that everything is fine, it is safe when in fact there are many, many studies out there which say the opposite – that it is actually a very bad practice to spread big city toxins over rural environments where they can get into the food chain and jeopardize water systems and soil.” “Toxic waste is the waste coming out of the waste water treatment centers and it’s toxic; it’s full of toxins,” he adds. Vincent confirmed, by his definition, the presence of a toxin makes it toxic.


“I think the point is we should be taking a precautionary approach rather than this risky and reckless one,” says Vincent. “We believe strongly that we should be trying to reduce these toxins and not be introducing them into rural areas and the food chain.” Vincent says there are alternatives “Cities like LA and London and Switzerland and Japan are turning towards gasification and pyrolysis so they are able to get energy from this resource and at the same time rid their environments of this,” he says. “Yes, there is an initial cost but in the long run it will be paying for itself.


In his own backyard, the city of Merritt had a private contractor compost their biosolids. “Right now, because of the moratorium that the five chiefs in the area have sensibly put in place, they are stock-piling it,” Vincent says. “They are talking to various players in the gasification area to get more information and some quotes to see if we can put something together.”


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