Water Impacts In the United Kingdom
Water Impacts In the United Kingdom. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Line On Agriculture.
I recently spent 2 weeks in England on vacation but also had a chance to spend some time wandering through some very dry fields of wheat. England, usually a very wet country is going through a drought and it is not only affecting farmers. Adrian Saunders is the Fisheries Enforcement Campaigns Manager for the Environment Agency.
SAUNDERS: Well it’s problems really right from the off because around about now we would expect to be seeing salmon and sea trout returning to our rivers and the lack of rain means they won’t get pulled into rivers. The trigger for them to come into the river, to head up river to spawn is rain. Cold, fresh water. So they won’t be getting pulled into rivers. They may well come in later in the year but the problem with that is it means that they’ve been sort of sitting in certain places in the estuary that can make them vulnerable to poaching.
He says that the whole cycle can be affected.
SAUNDERS: If you have low flow years then some of the spawning areas aren’t very well replenished with fresh water. The fresh water clears a lot of the gravel, cleans a lot of the gravel where the fish spawn so it does disrupt the whole system really. And you get the knock on effects from that several years down the line because you’re probably seeing the results in terms of fish coming back to spawn, those fish themselves were hatched in the river maybe three or four years prior to that.
And much like the states where water resources are an issue, the UK has some of those same problems.
SAUNDERS: Water resources is a problem for us. There’s two types of water we use in this country really. One is ground water so where we’ve got big chalk aquifers water is pumped out of the ground. Those aquifers require basically winter rain to recharge them. The other type of water we have sort of more in the north and west of the country is surface water collection. So where you’ve got hard granite bedrock we have big water supply reservoirs that capture the winter rainfall and it’s gradually released.
And like here in the U.S. there is a great need for water from many industries including agriculture.
SAUNDERS: That doesn’t go away when we don’t get any rain and if anything it gets worse because people use more water in the garden at home so there are conflicting demands on water and all that means is, you know all those people taking that water out of the natural systems there is less water in the rivers and we certainly see the impacts of abstraction.
More tomorrow on water impacts in the United Kingdom. That’s today’s Line On Agriculture. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.
