herbicides (1 Viewer)

i really hope the modern herbicides are ok for insects and birds
the local contractors recently sprayed hundreds of metres of grass edges around garden beds, walkways etc. with something like paraquat in effect that killed anything contacted. a week or so later all is dead along the edges, grass anyway but broadlefs and mosses are coming back.

my concern is that many birds pick along these edges all day, robin, blackbird, pigeon, dove, sparrow, dunnock and goldfinch, for exposed seeds and of course insects. i see them taking worms, grubs and small beetles.

i will try and find out what they use and what certification it has but imagine such poisons must get into microbial and insect life before it breaks down, if it does, to 'harmless' substances. its a worry, but hopefully baseless.

Regrettably not - even if it doesn't kill them directly, it leaves them with nowhere to find food, just a lifeless desert :-C :storm:

well that is a worry if it is, as i assume, a tested and certified usage. i am more concerned about it getting into food chain than a hopefully repopulatable (?) area of a few hundred sq. yds. the birds are choosing that area to forage because many worms fall off the edges or come up because it is barren.

the gardners, so called, already dont like me because i asked why they replaced hedging with grass and asked them not to strim the bushes and hedges until autumn. nice enough guys but simply work to a computer plan of 'efficiency'.

Many of us have long maintained that ag products like Roundup are a scourge.
Only now is society realizing just how bad glyphosate is to the environment.

thanks litebeam. it seems after decades of life i am still naive. this world is so damned regulated i assumed that the regulations and certification are for our benefit, and that 'for our benefit' should include the environmemtal niche we share. the world, Earth. again, i am found to be foolish. i am glad i wont be around much longer, i feel opressed from all sides and so much is negative. how stupid, to poison the very flesh of the mother we rely on for everything. i cant blame the workers but some people, somewhere in the chain of decisions was informed enough to know of this risk and a few hundred yards of grass in Warrington represents so much more around the world. damn them all.

Thankfully, some local councils here, including where I live, have recently stopped using Roundup and other products with glyphosate. Up to fairly recently these awful products were highly appreciated by the bosses and the workers as work and money savers and were very easy to sell.

Not too many years ago, glyphosate was even used in low amounts for slowing down reed growth in reedbeds in nature reserves in the uk...:eek!:

Also, not too many years ago I had a day out with a very nice chap, keen birder and working for Roundup sales (!). He explained to me how he used to sip it during promotion presentations - to show how "harmless" it was. I hope he's ok now.

Glyphosate (likely the chemical used in Warrington, as per Jape) was declared about a year ago as being "a probable cause of cancer to humans" by the WHO. A least this is a step in the right direction.

i will ask them straight up what they use. thank you.
people i find dont like it if you get too personal but i am almost in shock. i spent 30 yrs in oz bush then came back here and was shocked at changes in countryside and to be honest i then realised i had taken no responsibility for anything except directly personal. no tv, no papers and hardly cared except pretty good at commonsense stuff like my own garden and self sufficiency and good practice where possible. but being back in uk, so called civilisation freaks me out. i feel guilty that i did nothing, trusting experts and governments and authority. and on my new, local patch, i see these herbicides used, just a small example, a detail of an ecological nightnare. where did all the trees and hedges go?

Once I read that Roundup weed killer can cause cancer, I decided that none of these herbicides can be a good thing for wildlife and humans.

Simon Wates said:

Glyphosate (likely the chemical used in Warrington, as per Jape) was declared about a year ago as being "a probable cause of cancer to humans" by the WHO. A least this is a step in the right direction.

Click to expand...

Mud sticks, especially when flung by the WHO. However, no other major scientific study - including by the EU (two studies) and the Canadian government both of whom have highly regarded scientific oversight - have found any evidence that glyphosate is carcinogenic. Even the WHO study placed the actual effect as far less than many common foods.

I am a farmer, and folk like me have been using glyphosate for decades. Ill-effects ? undetectable - unlike many other commonly used agrochemicals, most notably insecticides like sheep dips. However. there have been concerns about some of the formulations of glyphosate, additives being mixed in by the manufacturer to improve it's effectiveness by, e.g., increasing resistance to rainfall shortly after spraying. Some of these additives have been banned.

As a farmer and conservationist I am extremely concerned at the environmental impacts of agrochemicals we use, and we strive constantly to reduce our usage. Glyphosate is actually one of the most environmentally friendly tools in our cabinet. By judicious use of glyphosate we can avoid far more harmful activities particularly by reducing the amount of cultivation we do. Everybody thinks of farmers as ploughing - much better for our soils, CO2 emissions and the planet if we don't. My brother farms some ground organically - he cannot find a way to stop ploughing that ground for every crop.

Speaking of organic farming - it doesn't use many modern agrochemicals, but we could not feed the planet by organic farming alone. We would have to increase the area farmed enormously (destroying much wildlife to do so), and then we would find that there isn't enough potentially suitable land on the planet to produce the food required.

So, farmers activities can be improved by judicious use of glyphosate, and other agrochemicals. I don't know about amenity work, what the cost/benefit balance for the planet looks like from their point of view. I do think that birds and animal health are not directly affected by glyphosate because we have decades of experience and no study has found any suggestion of a such a direct effect by glyphosate, and there have been many studies looking at possible factors driving the decline in wildlife over that time. I do agree there are indirect effects - destroy plants indiscriminately and you can destroy the food sources for all classes of animals and we need to be aware of that and try to maintain floral diversity wherever we can. I am doing this by establishing and maintaining native flower rich margins and meadows (on a purely arable farm) and am disappointed that there is not more effort in this direction, not just by other farmers but by all elements of our society - all that neat and tidy mown grass is a conservation desert (a few species do thrive in a desert, but not very many).

Mike.