LETTER TO THE EDITOR:
DOES the Victorian Farmers’ Federation and United Dairy Farmers Victoria work in the best interests of farmers?
The VFF and UDV recently held what I believe were totally biased presentations at Poowong in Gippsland and at Timboon in western Victoria promoting coal seam gas as a proverbial gold mine for farmers.
At the Poowong meeting on March 24, which I attended, few risks associated with this type of onshore gas mining were raised by any of the speakers, including UDV president Adam Jenkins, Dairy Australia representative Claire Miller and Gloucester, New South Wales dairy farmer Mark Harris, who has one capped AGL exploration well on his property.
Concerns, apart from briny production water, were raised only in questions from the floor and quickly closed down apparently because of time limitations.
CSG has numerous adverse impacts on land and water in terms of degradation, pollution and loss of biodiversity; air and noise pollution; social division within communities; and immediate economic impacts in terms of loss of property value in the surrounding vicinity.
In bushfire and flood prone areas the risk is amplified.
To extract the gas, wells are drilled and the water, which has previously been kept under pressure in the coal seams, rises to the surface.
This carries with it naturally occurring heavy metals and radioactive material along with some of the fracking fluid (which includes toxic chemicals) if the seam has been fracked.
This fluid is called production water.
The meeting was told that at Gloucester, currently production water was being trialled for use to irrigate pasture.
Interestingly, a mere few weeks later in the Sydney Morning Herald (April 9), it was reported that “AGL has ended its trial of using coal seam gas waste water for irrigation in northern New South Wales after regulators found it left behind unacceptably high levels of salt and heavy metals”.
It is well known that heavy metals entering the food chain pose a risk to human and animal health and increased salinity reduces sustainable agriculture.
It was also reported in the above mentioned article that in January this year, AGL’s operations had been suspended pending the investigation of the discovery of banned BTEX chemicals.
It seriously makes one wonder why the VFF and UDV would be promoting coal seam gas for Victoria.
