It won’t be 100% certain until the lab results are in but it appears at least 11 cattle have died from nitrate poisoning licking forestry fertilizer off the landings east of Quesnel. This is not glyphosate, for the record, but regular old fertilizer. It is paid for by taxpayers by the Ministry of Forests through the Forest Investment Program, formerly known as Forests for Tomorrow. Who knows about the dead wildlife.
Cattle, like all ungulates, are highly sensitive to fertilizer poisoning, and are attracted to it.Fertilizer is being sprayed on our forests from helicopters to boost the growth rate of the conifer plantations, many of which have been stripped of their deciduous component that would have fertilized for free. They use large B Trains with millions of dollars worth of fertilizer and load it onto helicopters using an auger and apparently a lot of loose fertilizer ends up on the ground.The rancher told me this wasn’t just a random spill from one site but multiple. They found 2 dead at one of the fill sites, 6 dead at another fill site (photo shown), 1 dead on the road just down from another fill site and another 2 dead about a kilometer away.The rancher told me this is just what they have found. There are possibly many more dead in the bush and there are many calves without mothers. Pregnancies are likely also impacted.These animals were for sure not poached or shot. There was a photo of one with a head wound in the comments on the WTF Quesnel post but that is likely from a mercy killing. I’ve seen video of one of these animals bloated and in great pain on the side of the road, close to death. It had not been shot.The rancher also stated that the contractor has been working hard to resolve the situation. They have filled the fertilizer contaminated landings with dirt so wildlife will not lick more of the fertilizer. It is important to criticize the larger operation and failed planning, not the contractors thrown into the job doing the best they can with equipment that may work on a farm but not suitable for the bush where wildlife and cattle poisoning is obviously a major risk.I have made a complaint to the RAPP line about not just this tragic situation but the potential for likely dozens of fill sites at landings throughout northern BC where piles of fertilizer may be sitting waiting for wildlife or cattle to kill themselves on. I know for a fact cattle are still out on public range around fertilizer spray operations north of the Blackwater river.If you know or see any of these filling sites with fertilizer piles, call it in, take photos, and do what you can to remove the fertilizer availability to wildlife or cattle (cover it with dirt but try to mark the location)This forestry fertilizer operation is a dodgy operation, for reasons listed in yesterday’s post, and this is just one more unfortunate situation that will hopefully result in accountability for those in government who have failed the public in delivering this operation.In a way this is the indirect result of herbicide spraying and brushing.Had we not sprayed and brushed the plantations in the first place, we would still have loads of birch, aspen, willow, cottonwood and deciduous vegetation building soil and injecting nitrogen into the soil for free. Instead we wasted money creating nutrient-deprived monocrop plantations that we then need to spray with artificial chemical fertilizer to fix.
What you see here is just one more unaccounted cost of the conversion of our forests from forests into simplified tree farms.
I have not heard of this before.