“The UK’s glyphosate addiction has spiralled out of control,” said Nick Mole of Pesticide Action Network UK, a campaign group which carried out the analysis. “We know that glyphosate has links to a range of cancers and other life-threatening diseases. And that it damages the environment, polluting our waters and harming wildlife.
“The government urgently needs to commit to phase out – and ultimately ban – glyphosate and support farmers and local councils to adopt safe and sustainable alternatives.”
There are no alternatives that actually do the job. That’s why we use it.
“The primary use of glyphosate in the UK is it’s applied before the crop is planted to kill off all the weeds that are growing in the field,” said Helen Metcalfe, an agricultural ecologist at Rothamsted Research in Harpenden, Hertfordshire.
The turn toward less destructive “regenerative” farming is a key reason for the increase in the use of glyphosate, Metcalfe said. The alternative would be to plough the field, destroying the weeds. But that would also damage the soil “and that’s what farmers are trying to protect”, she said. “They’re trying to protect their soil, trying to prevent erosion, trying to build up carbon in the soil and all that good stuff. To be able to do regenerative farming well you need to apply glyphosate.”
Quite.
Probably best if Jim weighs in but there’s shed loads of fields near me being ploughed, riddled etc before seeding.
AND the soil surface seems roughly level with the roads- presumably the road would have been higher at construction.
Is regenerative agriculture the Woke title for traditional farming so the left can pretend it was their idea?
There seems to be a lot less of the proper ploughing than I used to see twenty years ago. When I do see ploughing now, the tractor is whizzing along turning over the top few inches on a broad sweep (is it harrowing?) rather than getting a couple of foot down with a heavy-duty plough.
And much less use of livestock. All the dairy farms round here have closed, but I don’t even see the fields full of pigs for a season that I used to. Makes walking the dog a lot easier, but that’s not the purpose of a farm.
Which surprises me; I’d have expected rotation to be really back in fashion to keep the eco campaigners off their backs and the fertiliser bill down. But presumably it just isn’t as good as the obsessives claim.
But that’s not an informed or scientific observation. As you say, looking forward to Jim’s take on this.
Min till (minimum till) or direct drilling has been a fad in farming for some time now. Don’t plough the ground, disturb the surface as little as possible and all manner of wondrous benefits will appear. As you can guess, I’m not a fan. It works on some soil types. Others, not so much. Ploughing helps break up heavier soil types, prevents waterlogging, and buries weed seeds deep down, thus reducing herbicide requirements. Its something that needs to be decided on a case by case basis, farm by farm. But the adherents of the direct drill/min till concept have the light of religious zeal in their eyes and like all religious nutters think they are doing ‘good works’ by advocating their pet theory. At one point they had managed to convince Defra of the Direct Drilling True Path To Enlightenment™ and the last government’s environmental land management subsidy system actually contained special payments for direct drilling. By more luck than judgement the current lot have got rid of all that, so it looks like the direct drilling fad may be on the wain.
A lot of it is tied up with eco-bollocks. Increasing the soil carbon content is one of the current fads in the government/environmental sphere, and not ploughing can help to maintain soil carbon levels. So the direct drillers have pivoted from selling their idea as a one thats just good for the farmer (as its more profitable) to selling it as good for the planet instead.
My farm tends to do best when we plough. More consistent yields. Direct drilling is definitely cheaper to do, but if you have a really bad crop one in 3 or 4 because the weather and ground conditions worked against the method then you may be worse off.
What sort of criteria does one use for ploughing methods ?
If for instance you have a good clay or loam/loess soil, which retains water. you can afford to go deep.
But if you have chalk underneath, you should shallow plough, to stop getting too much chalk in the topsoil ?
It depends on the crop and the soil. Some crops (such as root crops) need a deep tilth to let the roots expand easily. Hence why they are grown in areas such as the Fens where the soil is measured in feet not inches. Cereals don’t root that deep so there’s no need to plough too deep. Just enough to turn the top over and break up any compaction in the top layer. Shallower is cheaper. Plus of course soil type means in many places you can’t go that deep because you’ll just pull up whatever the subsoil is, stone, chalk, clay.
Thanks Jim that’s what I guessed. We see a lot of cereals down my thanks to the thinner chalky soil.
Thank you Jim, that makes sense.
The energy costs of a full till are quite high compared to minimum tilling. That probably has more to do with the current practices than eco-love. Fuel is a much higher component of yield cost now than before.
During a visit to Waitrose yesterday to buy my favourite brand of porridge I noticed that the word “regenerative” had been added to several product descriptions. Regenerative crumpets anybody?
As in, do they make you fart?
Regenerative farting?
Is that when you pipe off the gas for fuel?
Mr Womby, I had cause to contact Budweiser last year when I saw their claims of “brewed using 100% renewable electricity”. Got a non-answer from some bird in their PR department who didn’t understand the question, (where do you get the electricity at night when the wind isn’t blowing?), asked AI who confirmed it isn’t brewed using 100% renewable electricity, and lodged a complaint with the Advertising Standards Authority because it is a blatant lie.5 months later I have yet to receive a reply.
Probably they use Carbon Certificates to claim that it is all neutral.
If you scrunch them up, they burn really nicely.
Regenerative is the new organic.
That sounds too much like an exothermic reaction when you eat it. No thanks!
I gave them a miss on the basis that they were three times the price of the Waitrose own brand.
Plenty of mechanical soil preparation round here, including ploughing. Plenty of crop variation from year to year too – potatoes, beet, barley, wheat, cauliflowers, carrots, lettuce – and pigs currently. The pigs shit all over the fields for a year or two and then they return to crops.
I don’t really understand the argument about trying to build up carbon in the soil. Ploughing in weeds will sequestrate carbon. Why cultivated land builds up soil at a rate of several inches/century. Killing the weeds & leaving them on the surface, eventually the carbon oxidises away. Why chalk downs have very thin soil. Most farm land that’s been ploughed for centuries is actually several feet higher than it otherwise would be.
Let’s be honest. Weedkillers are being used because it saves the effort of ploughing.
I would have thought that sitting on a tractor towing a sprayer is no less effort than sitting on a tractor towing a plough.
I suspect mpg towing a sprayer is better than mpg towing a plough. Fewer emissions, look you.
Glyphosate is not a replacement for the plough. We spray off a field before ploughing it just as we would before any other form of cultivation. You need to kill as may weeds as possible before putting the seed in the ground, you want the seed to have as little competition as possible. You’ll get weed/grass regrowth from dormant seeds after cultivation, you don’t need any of the growing weeds surviving as well.
I’m not arguing against the practice, Jim, it’s the claims in the article. Like preventing erosion. What causes erosion is the absence of vegetation’s roots binding the soil together. So, yes, if you remove vegetation to plant crops you can get erosion in the period before the crops grow. But since ploughing is done across slopes rather than with slopes it can reduce erosion. In heavy rain I’ve actually seen what looks like large areas of standing water on quite a steep hillside. Of course what you’re actually looking at is each individual furrow is flooded held in place by the ridge. And since the difference in heights between ridges is small, it looks like a lake of uninterrupted water, at certain angles.. If that hillside hadn’t been ploughed, the rain would just wash the topsoil down hill.
We know that glyphosate has links to a range of cancers and other life-threatening diseases
The word LINKS is doing all the heavy lifting here. Correlation is not causation and if any actual causal relationships had been found they would have been headlines in all the major news and scientific journals.
There was an (ethically suspect) effort to get glyphosate onto a UN list of substances that might cause human cancer (but no evidence that they actually do). Substances like bacon and chips, for example. Author of said effort was a plaintiff’s expert witness in a suit against Monsanto.
You mean “nutter”?
Or ‘grifter’; can be difficult to tell.
I believe a European Commission report into glyphosate concluded there was no evidence to support a causal link with cancers.
But it didn’t say it wasn’t, just no evidence and therefore it could be cancer causing and should be banned, says every eco loon and big business hater.
Farming Today this morning: “we’ve expanded how much land we use because we use low-intensity farming” So, reducing the amount of “nature” in the name of inefficiency.
Glyphosate is like nuclear power to the eco nut jobs, a technology beneficial to human progress with acceptable risk, it must therefore be stamped on otherwise some upstarts may question why we need to return to a peasant lifestyle. Hence it attract more than the usual frothing.
Incidentally, challenging green propaganda about glyphosate is one of my part-time hobbies, you can see a rare success at the end of this article
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c773r8y4x4lo
They made the correction after I had to escalate my complaint, their initial response was to tell me that I am too dim to read a news article correctly.
If glyphosate caused cancer then farmers and farm workers would be dropping like flies with it. We handle the concentrate, and over a lifetime must inhale plenty of it, and get it on our skin. Yet we are generally healthier than the general population. But I didn’t go to university so lack the skills to be able to explain away this little conundrum. Only a university education can equip you with the ability to ignore reality and bang away on your own ideological drum.
Seminaries and madrassas can do that, too.
+10e
10’°e?
And that it damages the environment, polluting our waters and harming wildlife.
No it doesn’t. Glyphosate breaks down quickly, within a few days. It’s great stuff.
“The government urgently needs to commit to phase out – and ultimately ban – glyphosate and support farmers and local councils to adopt safe and sustainable alternatives.”
Clever phrase, ‘support farmers’ by destroying their tools.
“Okay, Chief, let me see if I’ve got this straight. Nick Mole doesn’t want glyphosate sprayed on the ground. How tall is Mole?”
“We know that glyphosate has links to a range of cancers and other life-threatening diseases. And that it damages the environment, polluting our waters and harming wildlife.”
No we don’t KNOW we are told. But “links to” is not “caused by” and goes in the same category as “ could”, “might”.
And I see we have some more Eco-twaddle, another phrase to join “responsibly sourced” and “sustainable” – so “regenerative farming”.
This defined as: “…a holistic approach to food production that focuses on restoring and improving soil health, rather than just sustaining it or maximising short-term yields.”
Crop rotation, cover crops, putting animals in the field, natural fertilisers. So the way our ancestors did it – hunger, famines, low yields, crop failures.
Well, when you put it that way, it sounds like Pesticide Action Network UK just wants to kill everybody. Why is that not a crime against humanity?
As someone who paid their dues in the trenches of mass-tort defense – in my case, silicone breast implants – let me just predict that the supposed links to cancer from Roundup will be completely disproven within a decade.
Once the tort lawyers get that one jury to make that one huge award, the floodgates open. Settlements begin, out of fear of that billion-dollar loss – and the “proof” never again gets seriously questioned, until one manufacturer gets either brave or backed to a wall.
At my old local, a local lawyer would come round regularly for a break, a cigar, and to watch the racing. The standard welcome from the regulars was “how’s the ambulance chasing business going?”
Very successful to give him credit, he built a business on compensation claims and the like. His juniors deal with day to day stuff now, he does the promotion and high profile cases. Usual story for a law firm.
The last time I saw him he was researching glyphosate with a view to launching a big class action case. Dunno how that went.
Nice bloke but I have to admit after I moved I heard one of his ads on the telly, he does a lot of regional advertising. I complained to my wife “we’ve moved 500kms and I can still hear him!” 🙂 The man does talk a lot, conversations were generally pretty one sided.
For the Brits: TopDog Law
The UK’s glyphosate addiction
Gamecock sees weeds. He sprays them with Roundup. They die.
Did I miss something? It’s the weeds that get the negative or harmful consequences.