NUFFIELD CATCH UP MARK DEWES
Mark is a farmer and agronomist from Withybrook in Warwickshire. After starting with ADAS in 1996 and working with NIABTAG, AICC and Agrii he was awarded a Nuffield Scholarship to evaluate the role agronomists play in stewarding pesticide use. effects on use. Temporarily use has increased (think of the pre-em and triazole “stacking” we talked about more enthusiastically a few years ago) but this last hurrah may be giving way to a progressive movement towards regenerative practices which rely less on pesticides and more on the adoption of resilient systems. Groundswell captures the zeitgeist. Although the mood seems to have changed, the data to support this apparent shift in attitudes is not as easy to detect; the Pesticide Use Survey reports increases in pesticide used on arable crops measured by both weight and treated hectares.
The effects of pesticides on biodiversity are Implicit in their role and we all want, or at least are under pressure, to use less. But how?
Think of Denmark and you might imagine bacon, pastries, Hamlet and Carlsberg. You might also think of a country which relies almost exclusively on ground sources for its drinking water supply; probably the best drinking water in the world. To maintain this particular public good, Danish farmers have been subject to environmental protection laws and restrictive practices on pesticide use for 35 years. One of the most valuable visits on my Nuffield Scholarship tour was with Søren Thorndal Jørgensen who leads the coalition of farming and agronomy interests and negotiates with the strong environmental protection lobbies in Danish politics. His experience is one which I believe will be crucial to gain in the next decade here in the UK. Pesticide use is under a political spotlight in the context of a new National Food Strategy, revision of the National Action Plan for sustainable pesticide use and from across the English Channel and North Sea with the EU’s Farm to Fork strategy and its 50% pesticide reduction target by 2030. UK legislative response is currently in gestation. I sense a change in the attitude of farmers as well as legislators and the pesticide supply chain which is palpably different to that which I saw three or four years ago. That’s when I first made an organised attempt to evaluate our relationship with pesticides and the role that agronomists of all kinds play in that evolving affair. Successive product revocations and the build-up of resistant weeds, pests and diseases have had their 68 DIRECT DRILLER MAGAZINE
Integrated Pest Management has long been heralded as the solution to pesticide reduction, but as the graph shows, in the decade prior to 2018 we used increasing amounts while simultaneously adopting IPM plans as a compulsory part of the Red Tractor assurance schemes. Other studies have also recorded concurrent increases in pesticide use and adoption of IPM practices. It’s perfectly possible to use more pesticides while simultaneously using more cultural controls. It’s clear we need to do more than fill out an IPMP to demonstrate our sustainable approach to pesticide use. Back to Denmark and of all the policies, good and bad, put in place since the 1980’s the word from the coal face is that the recipe for success is simple: engage with the debate, make reasonable changes, evolve the approach and communicate the success. At the heart of the Danish experience has been the evolution of the metrics used to assess trends in use. Weight of product and treated area have limitations on their usefulness as they take no account of the equivalent effects of the products being used. A step in that direction was one which Denmark took in recording Treatment
ISSUE 14 | JULY 2021
