New authority seeks to conserve soil in Kinneret basin
Haaretz
August 1, 2007
By Eli Ashkenazi
Interest in Lake Kinneret goes deeper and wider than its water level or its recreational aspects, as seen by Monday's seminar marking the establishment of the Authority for the Conservation of Lake Kinneret.
Experts at the day-long meeting at Kibbutz Kfar Blum in the Hula Valley discussed agriculture, the environment, ecology, soil conservation and water, showing that the approximately 2,730 square kilometers of the Kinneret drainage basin is a world unto itself, that must be properly managed to protect the lake and the streams and lands around it.
For many years, the Kinneret Administration and the Kinneret Drainage Authority have been at work in the Kinneret basin. The administration protects the drainage basin against pollution, while the drainage authority looks after the streams leading into the lake. It has now been decided that there is a need for a body to deal with matters beyond the stream channels - conservation of the soil in the drainage basin.
"The goal of the authority is to deal with soil erosion and environmental nuisances before they reach the streams or the lake," said Moti Dotan, head of the Lower Galilee Regional Council and of the new body. Dotan says such treatment will save the state millions of shekels each year, which it now invests in cleaning the stream channels and removing waste from agricultural areas and open spaces.
Hillel Glazman, director of the stream monitoring department of the Israel Nature and Parks Authority (INPA), says that farming methods can contribute to soil destruction and erosion that creates problems in the stream channels. So far, streambed rehabilitation has only resulted in the faster flow of sediment through the stream bed to the Kinneret, increasing the damage. The creation of the new body "changes the concept to an overview of the entire basin, which will express itself in soil conservation in the upper basin," Glazman says. "By preventing erosion and conserving vegetation in the upper basin, we will be able to better protect the open spaces. That will mean water will remain in the drainage basin for a longer time, and we will in fact be going back to a more natural state."
Yoram Turzion, the Agriculture Ministry's regional coordinator of soil conservation and engineering, presented the group with the necessity for cultivation from an ecological perspective.
"Conventional agriculture is the main cause of soil depletion," Turzion says. "To keep yields high requires increasingly greater investment, while the depletion continues through continued cultivation and the use of fertilizers and water."
Turzion says this vicious cycle can be broken by using different sowing methods, minimum cultivation, planting ground cover, organic produce, etc. These measures will not only improve the soil but will reduce flooding, decrease pressure on drainage systems, prevent stream pollution by fertilizers and enrich the aquifer.
"When fertile soil erodes, the fertilizers are swept away with it. Our goal is for everything to stay in its place," Dotan says. "My grandfather, of blessed memory, used to say that you can't create even one grain of soil, and we have to protect the land for the generations to come. That's our job."
Dr. Guy Levy of the Institute of Soil, Water and Environmental Sciences in the Agricultural Research Administration, presented a look at the expected impact of climate change on surface runoff in agricultural areas. Global warming, he says, will lead to less but more powerful individual rainstorms.
"In semi-arid and arid regions like Israel, this means a decline in the rainwater exploitation, due to increased loss of surface runoff because of more powerful rainfall." Levy predicted that such changes would increase the use of purified sewage in agriculture, but noted that such use changes the surface of the soil, making it more difficult for rainwater to penetrate.
To this complex mosaic, Dr. Yeshayahu Bar-Or of the Environmental Protection Ministry added that longer dry periods had been recorded in the Kinneret basin with less water reaching the lake.
Monday's searing weather outside the seminar hall emphasized the necessity to move ahead on solutions to the issues under discussion indoors.
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