This week, ABC Radio Gippsland carried interviews with Friends of Earth campaigner Anthony Amis and Hancock Victorian Plantations General Manager Owen Trumper about replanting in College Creek and the use of herbicides which can affect water supplies.
Here's a transcript of what Owen Trumper said to Celine Foenander - see if you reckon he's believable especilly as Hancocks were asked by email about the use of Terbacil in it's fertiliser mix and chose not to respond. He also seems to think that revegetation is the same as regeneration.
' I’m joined now by Owen Trumper who is the manager of Gippsland’s, Hancock Victorian Plantations, good morning to you.
OT: Good morning Celine
Owen Trumper you would have heard Anthony Amis’s comments there. Are you using Terbacil?
OT: thankyou for the opportunity to clear up this misunderstanding. The fact of the matter is that we are not using terbacil or any herbicides up in the college creek area and the misunderstanding comes from a generic sign that we have created for our fertiliser bins, which is due to our infrequent times which we do put chemicals in our fertiliser, and we do it for OH&S reasons, so for people who are handling the fertiliser, we have these generic signs that ensure that they check to make sure that we are in fact aren’t using herbicides in that particular fertiliser batch and also we use it in case trespassers or passerbys tended to take some of the fertilisers for their home gardens and if that happened to have some of the herbicide at particular time it would have unfortunate results in their home.
So to clarify, what is in that bin?
OT: Oh its fertiliser.
Fertiliser to improve...
OT: Yes, fertiliser is part of our FSC certification. We have alot of strategies that we put down to minimise the use of herbicides and one of our strategies that we use is to try and fertilise our trees that we plant to give them a lift up above the competing vegetation, so it’s in fact one of our strategies that we use to minimise herbicide. If I can make just a couple of other points. In College Creek and in particu;ar the cores and links area, we have a regeneration strategy which is targeted towards recreating the natural forest that was there and isn’t for commercial plantations. So for example we plant at 300 stems per hectare for example, versus the 1000 stems per hectare that we would in a plantation and we are using a mix of three different species versus our commercial eucalyptus nitens that we use. So what that means in a herbicide sense is that the only time we use herbicide in the cores and links and in the college creek area is for the eradication of noxious species.
Do you use terbacil?
OT: we use a mix of herbicides, but the time that we would use any herbicides would for the eradication of blackberries and that occurs between November and march and that is part of the strategy for the cores and links is to eradicate noxious weeds and in particular blackberry to create the rainforest reserve that people desire up there on the cores and links.
Sorry, Can you confidently say that there is no herbicide on the ground there at the moment, because according to Friends of the Earth they have seen something on the ground.
OT: Yes well they have seen fertiliser and they have seen the sign and I can certainly understand the confusion and it would have been useful if somebody could have given this a call and we could have explained the situation and we wouldn’t have resulted in this kind of confusion.
But isn’t it misleading then Owen Trumper to put that sign on that bin.
OT: Oh not at all. I mean under our OHS programs we have generic signs to put up to warn people of the possible risks and for those infrequent times that we may put chemicals in our fertiliser that’s the procedures and policies that we have developed.
OK so there’s no herbicide on the ground there at the moment.
OT: No.
There might he herbicide on the ground there between November, come the time that to get these blackberries?
OT: That’s right and we directly spray those rather than a granular mix.
Is there any concern then that that spray will runoff into some of the creek areas and the rainforest areas if there is a huge dump of rain?
OT: No. Well. Just a couple of things I’d say, is that the application of herbicide is heavily regulated and as Anthony mentioned there, that there are conditions with which you can apply those things and knowing when, forecast of weather and all of those types of things are taken into consideration when we apply the herbicide. So we’re not concerned, we don’t believe that there is a risk of that translocation of the herbicide that we have used on the blackberries to outside of our sites.
Can you clarify this point that has been made by Friends of the Earth? They are worried that natural regeneration is deliberately being poisoned because they, do not want competition with the trees. They being Hancock plantations, do not want competition with the trees they have planted in this reserve. This could mean that the government or the company has plans to log these trees in the future.
OT: I can tell you that HVP plantations does not have any intention to harvest those areas in the future. The agreement we have with the State, is that once we harvest these areas, they are handed back to the state, so we wouldn’t have any opportunity to harvest those trees in the future anyway. And as I mentioned earlier, the regeneration standards that we have are roughly 300 stems per hectare which is clearly not a commercial or a plantation type of stocking, at any rate. So I think that people can be absolutely comfortable that there is absolutely no plans of harvesting of those trees in the future.
Has Hancock Victorian Plantations had issues with herbicide runoff before?
OT: Not to my knowledge. I’ve been here for five years and certainly am not aware of any herbicide runoff issues that we’ve had in the previous five years.
Hmmmmmm!!!!!
Tags:
college creek, hancock victorian plantations, terbacil
Posted at: 05:15 PM | Add Comment