Environment
Overuse and poor irrigation practices have led to increased salt content in the soil, reducing the productivity of the land. Irrigation salinity is caused by water soaking through the soil level adding to the ground water below. This causes the water table to rise, bringing dissolved salts to the surface. As the irrigated area dries, the salt remains. At Wakool in the Riverina region of New South Wales, irrigation salinity is mitigated through a salt interception scheme that pumps saline ground water into evaporation basins, protecting approximately 50,000 hectares of farmland in the area from high water tables and salinity. The subsequent salt has various uses including as an animal feed supplement. The program has returned to production over 2,000 hectares of previously barren farmland and encouraged the regeneration of native eucalypts.
Read more about this topic: Irrigation In Australia
Famous quotes containing the word environment:
“We learn through experience and experiencing, and no one teaches anyone anything. This is as true for the infant moving from kicking to crawling to walking as it is for the scientist with his equations. If the environment permits it, anyone can learn whatever he chooses to learn; and if the individual permits it, the environment will teach him everything it has to teach.”
—Viola Spolin (b. 1911)
“Modern man’s capacity for destruction is quixotic evidence of humanity’s capacity for reconstruction. The powerful technological agents we have unleashed against the environment include many of the agents we require for its reconstruction.”
—George F. Will (b. 1941)
“If the Revolution has the right to destroy bridges and art monuments whenever necessary, it will stop still less from laying its hand on any tendency in art which, no matter how great its achievement in form, threatens to disintegrate the revolutionary environment or to arouse the internal forces of the Revolution, that is, the proletariat, the peasantry and the intelligentsia, to a hostile opposition to one another. Our standard is, clearly, political, imperative and intolerant.”
—Leon Trotsky (1879–1940)