Are you building a residential home? Are you a council constructing playgrounds, or a construction company building a major motorway? All are subject to legislation managing water and sedimentation leaving your site.
Look at our Richmond River. Who is responsible [for the sedimentation]? Mainly farmers and the Department of Primary Industries.
Time and again we have studies and token projects to appease the concerned population,but nothing of significance is achieved.
Why is this section of our community allowed to flout the rules, and yet the rest of us must abide by them, or face penalties of tens- and even hundreds-of-thousands of dollars?
Many farmers do not restrict cattle from river banks, macadamia farms are not planting ground covers and continue with soil disturbing practices, and the sugar cane areas are still using drainage schemes developed in the 1950s!
Farmers must look at their current farming practices, and if they are contributing to the gigantic soil loss we see flowing out to sea for weeks, they must be forced to put into place systems to arrest this loss of soil, or to change to another type of farming.
Contact the NSW Soil Conservation Service: www.scs.nsw.gov.au (soil and erosion) for starters, and do your part in being a responsible landowner, because as I watch, tonnes of soil wash out to sea after every heavy rain. The farmers in the Richmond catchment are NOT land carers!
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
