Farming activists hold a banner reading 'Do you still want pesticides in your body? We don't' in a store of the agricultural group Arterris, in Carcassonne, France, following the EU's renewed authorisation of glyphosate. Photograph: Lionel Bonaventure/AFP via Getty ImagesSwitching to a plant-based diet is an essential component in the transition to climate and nature-friendly food production.
The goal of “organic no-till”, where neither chemicals nor ploughing are required, is being pioneered in some quarters using specially designed machinery or grazing animals to eliminate the weeds prior to sowing. Nevertheless, it is not yet widely adopted.Slovakia’s PM in life-threatening condition after being shot in ‘politically motivated’ assassination attempt
Con Trass is an apple farmer in Co Tipperary, one of about 30 in Ireland, only two of which are organic. He says fungal diseases are a real problem for producers while selective breeding for resistance to one pest can increase vulnerability to another. “It will be quite a while until we have varieties of apples that really have solid resistance that will enable us to reduce the number of fungicide applications ... I’d love if we had an alternative solution.
Methods for minimising the requirement for pesticide sprays are “well established” for permanent crops like apples, Trass adds. This started out with the use of natural predators of pests. “Nowadays we’re controlling aphids, red spider mites and caterpillars from certain moths using purely IPM systems”.
“One of the interesting things we found was that for one famous group of pesticides called neonicotinoids, which were banned across the EU a decade ago due to the risk they posed to bees, we are still finding residues of them in soils and in the nectar and pollen in crops. We also found pesticide residues not just in crops but wild plants that are flowering around the fields in which they’re applied,” she says.
An additional approach is to develop mitigation measures, such as directed spraying, or limiting spraying to particular times of the day. The Protects project looked at the recommended measures listed on the sides of chemical containers. According to Stanley, “We trawled the academic literature to see what evidence there was for their effectiveness, and unfortunately we didn’t find much.
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