Yesterday's editorial from Richard Rolke of the Morning Star, entitled "Opportunities Expanding" dealt with allowing treated wastewater to be used on food crops, and that the B.C. Ministry of Health is slow to "get with the program".
We need to ask "is there a long-term cost to soil health, even if it's deemed safe for consumption?"
"The murder of the soil...actually took years."
Golf Digest.com/November 2013, H2O
My recent blog entry (on Greater Vernon's $70 million water referendum this Fall) contemplated only whether there could be long-term effects of using chlorinated water--soon to be also filtered if the referendum succeeds. I basically mused whether soil bacteria and myccorhizae would suffer from the chlorine, and whether studies--one way or the other--were available.
Rolke's story detailed that California and Florida--on whom we Canadians rely for tomatoes in winter and citrus year-round--were already applying treated wastewater to food crops: "...apples, grapes, asparagus, lettuce, peaches, peppers, pistachios, cauliflower, celery and a host of other fruits and vegetables".
"The results of the five-year study have indicated that use of tertiary treated waste water for food crop irrigation is safe and acceptable," according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
And California has even surpassed state and federal standards, making the product safe to drink!
So, imagine my surprise when I happened on this phrase in a publication: "For golf superintendents, though, reclaimed water is not problem-free. Processed waste can be high in nitrogen and phosphates, which act like fertilizer, and superintendents have to manage the change, both on their turf and in their storage ponds."
The worst news was yet to come: "Reclaimed water can also be high in salts, which can accumulate in the soil and can damage turf and trees (...poor health of the surrounding trees was a consequence of the high salt content of the golf club's irrigation water).
The next sentence was the clincher: "The murder (of the soil), if that's what it was, actually took years."
(H2O, source GolfDigest.com/November 2013).
"Salt remediation--in which contaminated soil is treated almost like toxic waste--is expensive. Salt-tolerant turf can actually make a golf club's long-term water-related challenges more dire, by concealing soil problems until affordable solutions are no longer possible."
So, let's forget golf courses.
Consider effluent applied to food crops, which is what writer Rolke suggests the B.C. Ministry of Health is slow to approve.
We've all seen the alkaline lakeshores of watercourses around the Kamloops area, where the whitish shores are evidence of the natural process when water evaporates, leaving salt behind.
As salt levels in soil increase, degradation of soils and vegetation occurs.
So, while I can't find research articles on the effects of applying chlorinated water to soil, there are indeed scholarly studies about the effects of using treated effluent: here
Maybe the Okanagan shouldn't encourage Desertification!
"Seems chlorinated water isn't as big a deal compared to effluent after all," offers Kia.
...and then there's pharmaceuticals residue...
Many years ago one of the vets from Vernon Vet Clinic wrote a letter or two to the editor of the Morning Star to warn the public about the health effects on livestock that graze on effluent treated land.
ReplyDeleteAs I recall, effluent caused pathogens are found in the tissue of livestock, and therefore have a consequence to human health. I also believe something was said about the health of people in close proximity to effluent sprayed fields who would be exposed to effluent mist.