5^th International
Acid Sulfate Soils Conference

Club Banora, Gold Coast

Thursday, 29th August 2002
 Final Draft

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Sorry, have not included the powerpoint.

Hello and good morning, yes, as Robert has been telling you, I am Professor Ivan Davinsky from the Leopold Institute, part of the Far Western campus of the University of Leningrad.

I am thanking you for inviting me to being here on your Golden Coast for this most established conference.  In the past perhaps I might have been applying for political asylum, but now I think that to live on the edge of Siberia is better than to live in the camp in your desert.  A little joke, nyet?

I am very pissed to be here in Australia for the first time and am already apologising if for you my English is not so good as my Russian  But quickly I have been learning to say one thing to you in Australian “geeday” and someone is telling me that to make you happy is to say “aussie, Oi Oi”, this is right?

I am being here in Australia for the River Symposium in  Brisbane and while I am here the conference organisers have been asking me as Professor of Volga River Soil  Sciences to also come and address this group to be telling you the methods of remediation we have employed with Acid Sulfate Soils which have being successful. So please be forgiving me because I have made this presentation in one day and I am not used to using a computer with Windows in English.  But is good to see that even in Australia as in Russia there is with Microsoft the loving - hating relationship.

Before I start please I wish to show you a map of the new Russian provinces [SLIDE - MAP]. And you will see a greeting in Russian and I am sayng to you “pre-bee-yet”.   Here is Moscow, [SLIDE] this is as you call it St Petersberg  [SLIDE] and this is where I was brought up and am now living, [SLIDE] the city of  Fraudya in the province of Gotyastan.

[SLIDE - CHURCH] This area is of great historical and spiritual significance to the Russian Orthodox religion and has many important shrines and churches.  As a tribute to my ancestors and as my own contribution to the new Russian society I am very happy to being able to be help and fix some of the problems of the past years which has caused much degradation of the soils since the revolution

 I am not knowing the information you are understanding about the acid sulfate soils in the Russian provinces so I am explaining.

In the days of the Soviet Union things were not so good as they are now.  [SLIDE – QUEUE] You have all been seeing in your newspapers about the constant food shortages and lines for bread in the shoppings. This was putting on the extra pressure for the government to have enough to eat for the people.  Thus began in my country a push by the state into lands that had never been cultivated before. [SLIDE – FARMERS] This was so the state could ensure that there was sufficient production of wheat for bread, beets for sugar and of course rye for Vodka.  Salut!

It is most unfortunate that modern agriculture has lost many of its traditions and cultural understandings.  In the past people working with and living on the land had learned that there were certain areas that were not to be disturbed.  They did not always understand the problem, nor could they even name it, but centuries of wisdom had shown that there was a right or wrong way to do just about anything.  This was especially important in the production of food as it is essential to survival particularly in marginal environments such as those of Gotyastan.

I don’t need to explain anything to you about Acid Sulfate soils, how and why there are problems and some of the methods of dealing with the soils.  However, tonight I have been invited to share with you a method that has been employed to deal with ASS in Eastern Europe for many generations and had been lost until recently.  Then I will move on to a new method we have discovered that is at the cutting edge of technology. And I will be talking about how we deal with toxic metal runoff from ditched areas.

Let me start with the traditional solutions.  Obviously any method that is centuries old will seem rather primitive and even quaint, but the area in which I was raised has a long and ongoing history of having to be innovative to solve their problems.  Apart from trying to eke out a living on some of the toughest land on the Western side of the Ural mountains, there is the living memory of war, famine, and bitterly cold winters.  Someone said to me that it is just like Melbourne. – this is a joke, nyet?

But despite the hardships and trials they have endured for many generations, the people of Gotyastan have a proud tradition of working what is relatively fertile land compared to the lands in Siberia, on the other side of the Urals. Of course, calling our lands fertile is purely relative.  Although the spring and summer are very comfortable, there have been winters that have become part of folklore, the winter of 1962 will long be remembered as one of the toughest in human memory as the winds blew long and hard from the Artic circle[SLIDE - SNOW].

No matter how cold it does get for a single winter, we are fortunate that in Gotyastan we do not have to deal with permafrost.  Maybe later, if I have time. I will be telling you about a novel ASS method for people that have to cope with soil that is frozen for 5 months of every year in what is locally known as Freezerburg – this is a joke, nyet? 

As I said, it is the traditional methods that have proved to be effective, though, unfortunately, only on a small scale and while this has been useful in the past, with the changes made to agricultural practices since the Russian Revolution [SLIDE – LENIN] & [MUSIC] the problems of dealing with soil related problems are growing rapidly

Like many other countries we have to deal with falling water tables, rising of salinity, desertification, loss of nutrients, erosion, siltation and on and on are our list of woes.  This is especially a problem in a country which is so reliable on subsistence farming .  As our population is rising, our ability to produce food is falling and we don’t even have a war on the horizon so we can claim international aid.

My grandparents worked the land and in speaking to my aging grandfather and his comrades I have learned many new ideas.  Actually, they are old ideas that have become new once again.

Grandfather Uri who is now too old to work on the farm, but not too old to be still telling me what to do, told me and my research team that the problem with ASS or “sharp soils” as it is literally translated have been around since he was a child.  He remembers his father tailing him about the colour of the soil and how the water changed so that fish would die in the area.

Since the land and the rivers were their livelihood it was a matter of life and death that an easily workable solution be found.  Being within a reasonable cart ride of the ocean, they would gather shells from the shores of the Caspian Sea, [SLIDE – CASPIAN SEA] take them to the “Grolshni Burovnos”  which translates literally as circle of soil revival.  It was here that the donkeys would walk in endless circles over the shells crushing them and crushing them until they were a coarse powder.

Once this had been achieved, the crushed shells would be encased in the skin of a pig that had been a recent meal, [SLIDE - PIG] soaked for some time and then left to dry.  Once the complete, the “Chunchya” as it is called. would be laid in fields or across the open mouth of the streams to carry out its magic.

And to the peasants of the time, magic it was.  The song passed down from generation to generation and sung by young children tells the tale of the pig that had swallowed the shellfish, walked into the sharp soils, drank from the stream and had died.  Unnoticed it had laid where it fell and the people noticed that soon a remarkable transformation took place.  The colour of the soil changed, the fish soon returned, the lands became more fertile.  This is how a legend takes hold and with simple people it is hard to convince them of anything else.

We now know that it is the lime in the sea shells that was the saviour of my ancestors and it would likely work in a hessian bag as well as a pig skin, but powerful myths are difficult to dispel and I wonder if it is even necessary to do so.

[SLIDE - FARMERS] In their ignorance, these people, who knew nothing apart from farming, had solved a problem that looked certain cause their shift to the city and the loss of their traditional culture and their homes.

If we now move forward to the present we see the “Lime Slot” project here at Woongoolba on your Golden Coast. This is a very strange name that someone has told me has come from your black aboriginals.  It is good to see that you also are retaining your cultural links to the history by keeping the ancient names.

[SLIDE – SLOTTING] This project at Woongoolba is very successful I understand.  I have studied the technical paper on this and the similarity with what Papa Uri and his comrades were doing is striking.  I will be taken to this place tomorrow I think and I will certainly be looking to see if they are using Papa Uri’s pig skins.

The pigskin chunchya is a method from the Russian past and it has worked successfully for them for many years, but as I am telling you, it is an old fashioned way that must be improved on for the 21^st century and perhaps we will do things like you are doing here.  But our problem, you must understand that in poor areas such as Gotyastan, it is impossible for the people to afford big machines.  Even for ploughing the field they still use a horse or donkey.

There has been much discussion, both at this conference and in academic circles regarding bioremediation.  It is increasingly looking that this is the way to proceed, but I wish to state that it is the opinion of the Volga Institute that your western ideas are fundamentally flawed in the same way as your political system.

People in the west are generally strong believers in what is laughingly called a liberal democracy, but I would argue that the true democratic process was born and thrives in the Russian provinces. While Tajikstan, Estonia, Kazakhstan and Kryzhykstan all do still have a long way to go, Gotyastan, Latvia, Dagastan Lithuania, Moldova, Armenia, Belarus and Chechnya have all made remarkable progress in the recent years.  It is through hardship that my people have learned to cope with the necessary struggle that accompanies the birth of a new nation and with it a new way of political thinking.

As we have moved forward into what we call a progressive democratic associative society, we are having to learn to cope with the ways of the outside world, contact with which has been limited for over a century.

Yes, there has been some international scientific help for our agricultural problems, including some expensive consulting by some people in this room.  But we found your patronising attitudes to the mighty Russian people condescending and frankly, of not much use.

When we have been using the ”Chunchya” pigskin process for centuries, the notion that a westerner can come in, scoff at generations of tradition and make unrealistic suggestions that are totally impractical for the peasant farmers of the Russian steppes is laughable.

They made extravagant claims for their methods of alleviating potassium deficiency in Acid Sulfate soils under sugar cane cultivation.  This was highly amusing to the farmers in a region that does not grow sugar cane.  But since they were honoured and respected guests and we are a polite people nothing was said at the time, however I feel it is appropriate to raise the matter in this distinguished international forum.  O, now is forgotten.

Also, using limestone is problematic.  As the level of the Caspian Sea has retreated and the former shoreline has been developed, plundering of the shells by collectors, farmers, and children on vacation has caused the amount of shells available within a reasonable distance to fall dramatically.

Of course, there are other sources of limestone such as coral reefs and caves. [SLIDE – CAVE] Mining of limestone is not easy nowadays.  We know it is not good to detroy the caves of the bats that pollinate our crops and fruit.  Also is not good to be dredging the coral reefs.  Besides, there is not a lot of naturally occurring lime in Russia.  Salt, we have plenty, lime nyet.

We do have a major problem with rising saline water tables and arsenic and iron in Acid Sulfate soils, but when the consultants handed us their glossy report, the matter was not addressed at all.  So it cannot be a surprise that we in Eastern Europe are suspicious of solutions imposed on us by the west.

Being an industrious people we decided to invest in our own solutions, practical solutions to real problems that exist for the people with whom I grew up.  From a small child I made the decision that I would be the person who would come up with the answer to the what was making the soil red and I was sure it would not involve pig skins.

My tertiary education was in agriculture but I could see the writing on the wall and it was in English This writing said something about a new science called Genetic Engineering.  It dawned on me at that time, in 1985, that this was going to be the answer to our problems, though at that point I had no idea in what way.

I spent many years in the lab researching ideas and while I was not responsible for the genetic sciences myself, I worked alongside a strong team originally founded by renowned geneticist Professor Boris Islakinof.  [SLIDE – TCHAIKOVSKY]

My job was to lead a scientific think tank in which we spent many hours theorising about the possibilities.  When we had brainstormed enough alternatives we then spent much time discussing the possibility of implementation and the chances of success. Ultimately we threw out most of the preposterous ideas as one does in a brain storming session, but they did lead to the genesis of other  proposals.  Further investigation, much trial and many errors eventually led us to an incredibly successful and easily implemented regime.  Yes, we did have success, far more than we had hoped and in an manner that has become more controversial than any of us had expected.

Tonight I want to share with you a remarkable development in remediation of Acid Sulfate soils that is to be published in the October issue of Nature journal. [SILDE – NATURE JOURNAL] I have been given special permission to discuss the project with you since this renowned conference is the pre-eminent gathering of scientists working in the field of Acid Sulfate.

Having read extensively about the limestone slot procedure used here in Australia we decided to investigate taking the process a step further. [SLIDE – SLOTTER] One of the problems with the trial, as you can see is the need for large items of equipment.

We could see that with the vast distances involved in the Gotyastan region we would need to look at some alternative.  This is vital if we are to have the farmers participate on a local level.

The fast move forward in gene technology led my group to innovative ideas, most of which were impractical, but some did show promise and they were thoroughly tested, generally leading to disappointment until one day we had an incredible success.

Limestone is the second most abundant mineral on earth after quartz, which makes use of this mineral an attractive and financially feasible option.  We did an intensive study into whether Oolite was preferable to Aragonite,  as this would most certainly affect the direction of our research but it turned out that due to stability issues and abundance factors, calcite was the final choice.

But as I said, mining limestone is not necessarily the preferable solution.  As you would know, limestone has its origins in coral reefs.  The geology of Russia is such that since it is still recovering from previous ice ages, reefs have never flourished in the area, hence the lack of limestone in Eastern Europe.

The colour of coral is caused by a symbiotic relationship between corals and unicellular algae called zooxanthellae. ]SLIDE - ZOOXANTHELLA] These microscopic plants live within the coral tissue and provide the coral with food for growth and their normal healthy colour.  It also is a major factor in the production of  the calcium carbonate exoskeleton that builds a coral reef as countless generations of  coral build on top of each other creating a massive substrate often adorned with spectacular shapes and colours.  [SLIDE – CORAL]

Your Great Barrier Reef is a wonderful example of such a structure.  Year after year after year, the tiny corals build upon the structure laid down by previous generations.  Sometimes the oceans recede and the reef becomes part of the land mass, often forming spectacular caves. [SLIDE – CAVE]

The genetic makeup of some of the myriad of members of the Zooxanthella family has been well understood for several years now as it is a comparatively simple organism.  At the Volga Institute we took the genetic map a step further and isolated the gene for calcium carbonate production, the part that builds the actual reef.

We attempted to insert this gene into several plant species in the hope that they would express limestone in some manner and many of them did, but not necessarily in the way we expected. 

Our first attempts to insert the gene into other organisms failed miserably.  We had a list that we thought would be both scientifically and ethically acceptable and worked our way through it slowly.

Our initial experiments with legumes such as clover showed promise, we had hoped that by forcing the plant to express calcium carbonate in its leaves we could plough the whole plant back into the soil, releasing the lime and thus help improve the soils.  The concept was successful, however the result showed our real lack of understanding in such matters.  Legumes are nitrogen fixers and as such are very important for soil health even though it ultimately can contribute to soil acidity. 

We made an important discovery about the nitrogen fixing abilities of legumes in that they are inextricably linked to the potential lime production.  No matter what matrix of genetic framework was applied, the drift of the hoaxofline configuration was enough that the nitrogen fixing abilities of the plant were lost, to the point where it was not worth planting, even for the remedial benefits of acid sulfate soils.

We then successfully inserted the gene into lime trees, but what on earth are we going to do with limestone limes? 

As we are all scientists we know that there is no such thing as failure, it is just an experiment that is leading us along the path to success..  So we persevered.  My stimulation came from Dr Henk de Baaker and my early studies at the superb drainage course he used to run at Vergeningen in the Netherlands when I was a post graduate student.  Ah we had good times there.  We drank so much vodka we couldn’t walk, but not so much that we couldn’t drive.

Whenever our experiments at the Volga Institute did not succeed I looked to the poster on my wall that was presented to me by Dr de Baaker for inspiration.  Unfortunately the poster was in Dutch and I did not understand a word of it.  But I knew its source and it carried me and my team onward toward our goal.

One day, late last year we finally did it, we finally managed to express calcium carbonate in an unrelated species that was endemic to our region.  Tonight I am very proud and privileged to be making this announcement to my peers at the 5^th International Acid Sulfate Sols Conference in Australia.

[SLIDE – DNA]Using the latest biotechnology we have taken the CON4 gene from zooxanthellae the plant that builds coral reefs and inserted it at JOK17 of the Volga Catfish [SLIDE] which we have also altered to be tolerant of acid waters with a pH in the range of 5.2 – 5.8.

We then release the catfish into the affect waters and over a period of time, as the water is passed over the gills of the catfish, the acid is slowly but surely neutralised.

Now, not only is this incredible, but there are some unexpected advantages for the farmers that encourage them to participate. The Volga Catfish is one of the most prolific breeders on the planet.  [SLIDE - CATFISH] The female will lay approximately 1000 eggs each week, eggs which have an extraordinary protein coating that allows them to live in waters with a  wide pH range, but they will only hatch when the pH falls.  Populations are kept in control because Due to the acidity of the water they have no natural predators so their numbers are generally controlled by the food supply, an acid loving phytoplankton. 

The added attraction that makes them so popular is that once numbers of catfish have built up the farmers have an additional protein source, if they can catch the fish, because they are very fast and slippery.

Now all of this is very good, but in these poor areas of the Russian province, monitoring the soils is difficult over such a vast area.  But in this case we have built in monitoring.  Since the adult fish cannot live in pH neutral water, when the acid has been neutralised, they die and we can safely say that the area has been cleaned up and is fit for planting again.

We have applied for a patent on this and we know that once all you western capitalists discover how fantastic our process is and want to use it, we will be rich, rich, rich.  Then we will be eastern capitalists and we will end up like you.

We will be able to afford western decadences like television and the first show we will all want to watch is Big Brother.  But in the Russian version, fifteen political prisoners will be locked in central prison.  They will all be tortured and the last to confess is the loser.

[SLIDE - LAP DANCING] We will have other depraved activities like lap dancing, but when a Russian girls sits on your lap, you better have a strong lap. 

Let me take you back to this map