avemariaJust my only personal opinion of course and a bit of...

avemaria

Just my only personal opinion of course and a bit of history....

I fully support protection of our aquifers and speak as someone who was raised on the land.

Lets start with the rivers...

What's left of the Peel river near Somerton where I lived could be safely used as drinking water when I was a boy.

Now it is so polluted that only 100k from the headwaters above Nundle that it is unsafe to drink and you wouldn't dip your finger in it if you had a cut!

This river is the beginning of the whole Murray Darling system.

So what has happened to our river systems ?

Clearly, reduced rainfall from global warming is a major problem with respect to river flows.

Thatone is easy to fix by setting global population reduction targets to reduce theplanet's population at the fastest practical rate to a sustainable greenhouse emissions level but lets face it,that's notgoing to happen & can't even the talked about.

The one thing we could do though is to emphasise organic farming practices that don't use harmful chemicals or weed killers.

50 years ago we only ever put lime or gypsum on the soil, farmed on the contour with chisel ploughs to catch every drop of rain and grew Lucerne and legumes with our crops to build up nitrate levels. We were able to build deep soil structure and this gave premium yields that were off the scale & we made $$$$$ which we put in our pockets rather than pay for fertilisers and weedkillers.

To control the few weeds that grew in the healthy soil we used a weed killer called a product called Anoe which was applied manually by a 14 year old boy safely with no protective clothing except a hat and cost in todays terms about $1.50 per acre. Anoe of course stands for a hoe. Took about a day to do 50 acres.

Sadly the tens of thousands of tones of chemicals and weedkillers used in modern agriculture are not only finding their way into our rivers, they are slowly percolating their way downwards by gravity and will eventually pollute the underground aquifers below.

IMO if the environmental lobby was really serious they would focus on this problem first rather than the relatively minuscule impact of fracking.

Clearly fracking, particularly the highly controlled "Micro Fracking" of horizontally drilled wells and fracking of wells thousands of meters deep will not cause the relatively harmless chemicals used to make the propping agent (Usually sand) flow down the pipe to somehow mysteriously defy gravity and rise to pollute surface aquifers.

I honestly see "Surface Fracking" by agricultural production as a huge problem.

Dumping of chemicals and carcinogens on the surface will not cease because of their importance to modern agriculture and to ban them would be political suicide.

Just my two bobs worth

Regards

OGP