Water: Water Quality and Challenges from Agriculture

Abstract

In general, the increasing proportion of agriculture in a catchment parallels a decline in water quality. Farming systems, although optimized for profit, may not be optimized for a catchment's climate or physical geography resulting in losses of nutrients and sediment, key indicators of poor water quality. Strategies are available to mitigate these losses and should be chosen to fit the farm system and water quality objective. Globally, there are also many initiatives that aim to buffer the economic impact of changing management or strategies prescribed to reduce nutrient or sediment loss. However, care must be taken to fully assess the impact of land-use change or mitigation strategies within a catchment before policy is implemented, otherwise factors such as time lags may mean that water quality objectives will not be achieved.