The Scotsman

Wet weather and glyphosate threat a double whammy

Comment Brian Henderson

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Despite our ill-deserved reputation to the contrary, I think the industry should probably be congratula­ted for knuckling down and trying to make the best of a bad job over the last few months of soul-sappingly poor weather.

But the continued absence of a dry spell, combined with last night’s storms, has now crystallis­ed a need to impress upon the wider world that the countrywid­e delays in harvest, silage-making, tattie-lifting, baling, planting, slurry spreading and sheep handling caused by the seemingly endless unsettled weather has left farmers struggling to cope.

Most obvious has been the demoralisi­ng and seemingly unwinnable battle which harvest has become in much of the country, with combines standing idle while driers continue to run overtime, trying to cope with the high moisture of grain harvested between the alltoo-frequent squalls and downpours.

And when growers meet, there has been aracetothe­topofthe moisture metre scale as they trade details on just how high they have gone. And I know from painful personal experience that, with a few carefully judged tweaks to the settings, a combine can cut grain at 38 per cent moisture – at least for a few hundred yards before blocking some element deep in its intricate innards.

So it is particular­ly galling that this coming week could see one of the few weapons in this armoury outlawed – when the EU

0 Few arable farmers have had good weather for harvest sits down to discuss the re-registrati­on of glyphosate.

While a final vote might once again be postponed, crunch time for this most widely used of sprays is fast approachin­g – and without a decisive vote in favour of its re-registrati­on before the end of the year we will lose the product.

Now there has been endless talk of the implicatio­ns which the loss of glyphosate would have on growers – but for many farmers in Scotland this “bottled sunshine” has probably been the only sort which has been available this year to ripen the crops and weeds off enough to get the combine into the field.

The argument over whether the product is safe has been well rehearsed – but away from the politics, the vast majority of hard scientific evidence and thinking shows it to be so.

A major report claimed a ban would cause a £930 million drop in farming turnover the UK – but I would guess that Scotland’s arable farmers would bear more than their fair share of this drop.

And although crop growing might be confined to a relatively small area of Scotland’s farmland, production of barley, wheat, oats, oilseed rape and straw produced in the country has a huge impact on all the livestock sectors – as well as playing an absolutely key role in the production of our greatest export earner – whisky.

And this year’s summer has highlighte­d that, even with the harvest management provided by glyphosate, we struggle with the vagaries of the climate – but without it Scotland’s cropping sector would be truly compromise­d.

But while farmers are rooting for re-registrati­on the industry shouldn’t be seen in the role of apologist for Monsanto, the company which first developed the product in the early 1970s and made huge profits from their various formulatio­ns of the chemical under the Roundup name, even after the product came off-patent, chiefly by tying the market up with geneticall­y modified “Roundup Ready” crops.

Their aggressive marketing turned Europe against GM crops – and the corporate arrogance displayed in refusing to attend a hearing called by the EU to look into allegation­s that it influenced studies on the safety of its products, has seen Monsanto and its lobbyists barred from the European Parliament in the runup to the crunch vote.

And with the French already committed to banning the product and German support now wavering as Angela Merkel woos the Greens for her “Jamaica” coalition, politics rather than science, will decide the issue – with major implicatio­ns for Scotland’s growers.

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