EU bans neonicotinoids

[JerryHaskins]

I am not anti-honey bee. And, I agree that the insecticide and herbicide manufacturers are major proponents of banning products after their patent expires in order to force consumers to pay more for newer, safer, shorter-lasting products.

And I think bald eagles and butterflies are great.

But I worry about humans, too, and I think that we go too far sometimes.

(I am not fond of fire ants.)

This morning I saw a news report that the CDC says that diseases transmitted through the bites of blood-feeding ticks, mosquitoes, and fleas are a growing public health problem in the United States. Reported cases of vector-borne diseases have more than tripled nationwide, growing from 27,388 cases reported in 2004 to a whopping 96,075 cases reported in 2016. Since 2004, there have been nine vector-borne pathogens newly identified as concerns among humans in the US.

The vector borne diseases in the US include Lyme disease, anaplasmosis/ehrlichiosis, spotted fever rickettsiosis, babesiosis, tularemia, Powassan virus, Dengue viruses, Zika virus, West Nile virus, malaria, chikungunya virus, California serogroup viruses, St. Louis encephalitis virus, Eastern equine encephalitis virus, yellow fever virus, and plague.

"Correlation" does not necessarily equal "causation", but I think that increased pesticide restrictions are partly responsible for the increase. People (especially poor people) need a cheap, easy way to deal with the insects.

CDC report

PS: Did y'all know that honey bees are not native to North America? They were brought over from Europe in the 1600s. Nowadays they would probably be listed as an invasive species.

[PureHarvest]

Originally Posted by Cole_Robbie

Ironically, reducing tilling and plowing has been the biggest environmental benefit of the Roundup-ready revolution. When I was a kid, soil erosion was the hot environmental topic. It's mostly a moot point today, now that most farms have moved to no-till, roundup-ready crops. They spray and plant in one pass. We may certainly have swapped one problem for others, time will tell.

Another issue with regulation is that governments are national, but our food supply is international. We are eating food from countries where the governments struggle to maintain basic social order. It would be nice to think they regulate their ag chemicals, but that seems like wishful thinking to me. And thanks to our trade agreements, we are not allowed to ask any questions about imported produce. Banning a chemical from American farms does not remove it from our grocery stores, by any means.

Cole, not-till does not have to mean Roundup is a major part of the equation.
Cover crops that smother and then winter kill will eliminate fall and spring herbicide applications. There is a farmer in Ohio that has been doing this for years and has cut his herbicide use in 1/2. He also uses a fraction of the nitrogen inputs and his yield is higher than the county average. Not a small plot exception either, he has 1,110 acres Cover crops and no-till are the main things that make his system work:

Reducing Crop Inputs
“Cutting back on commercial inputs has been a tough one for me, because we’ve always been taught we need so many pounds of nitrogen, phosphorus and potash to grow a decent corn crop,” Brandt says. “We’re learning now with cover crops that we don’t need to buy those additional nutrients because we can bring them up from deeper in the soil. They just weren’t available to the crop before.”

“In fact, we’ve learned in the last two years that we can go to using almost no purchased commercial fertilizer or herbicide and still produce a great crop of corn and beans.”

“Our nitrogen use in fields without cover crops is 170 pounds an acre. Where we have cover crops and longtime no-till, we’re down to about 20 pounds an acre. That’s more than $100 an acre per year nitrogen savings, and we’re not sacrificing any yield.”

The nitrogen comes from cover plants like hairy vetch, Austrian winter peas, cow peas, and sun hemp. They pick out nitrogen from the atmosphere and translocate it into nodules on the roots, Brandt says.

“Some of those nodules will be as big as your thumb. Soil bacteria break them down, and the nitrogen is released slowly in an organic form that the corn plants can use,” he says.

Every cover crop grown on the farm has at least two species. Brandt is moving toward multiple species in the blend, because some—like hairy vetch, late-planted winter peas, cereal rye, barley and wheat––will stay green and keep growing through the winter.

“If we can keep something green in the ground with multiple species, we can build soil faster. So we like multiple blends better than two species,” he says.

“It will take 6-7 years to change or improve a soil with just no-till, but that time can be shortened to 4-5 years or as few as three years if you also use the right blend of cover crops.”

Covers bring up nutrients

Brandt is trying 8- and even 14-way blends of covers. “I’d like to learn more about which covers can bring up trace elements,” Brandt says. “We’ve seen buckwheat bring up phosphorus and zinc, for instance, and sunflowers bring zinc up too.”

Yet, he won’t put in a cover if it won’t pay for itself. “You shouldn’t spend any more for seed on a cover crop than what you can gain in reduced fertilizer costs or increased yields. That’s always been our philosophy,” he says.

Generally for Brandt, cover crops cost from $20 an acre to $35 an acre.

Suppressing pests naturally
The soil health payoff can come in other reduced inputs, too. “We’ve had less weed and pest pressure as we’ve gone along. We see more host insects that will prey on the insects we don’t like to see in the fields,” Brandt says. “We’ve found radishes give off a sulfur smell, for instance, that fumigates the soil and reduces cyst nematodes and slugs in the soil. We’re proud to say we’ve quit using insecticides on the farm.”

Their cover crops suppress winter annuals and broadleaf weeds, and Brandt has cut herbicide use in half.

“We have less sudden death syndrome and less white mold in our beans and less northern corn leaf blight in our corn, too,” he says.

More Microbes a Key

Brandt says he didn’t realize microbes were so important to farming a few years ago. “But I’ve read about how vital they are, and now I see as they increase, we see more good things happening in our soil—more nutrients being released, more water infiltrating into the soil. The more microbial activity we have, the better off we are,” he says.

“I’m really intrigued with the amount of water infiltration we’re seeing with our cover crops. As we go to cover crops with deeper roots, and bigger root masses, we’re seeing rainfall dissipate through the soil better. We don’t have water pockets in our tight clay soils any more.”

Cover crops also moderate soil temperatures. “On hot summer days, with air temperatures over a hundred degrees, our neighbors had soil temperatures of 118 degrees and ours was 86 degrees. Our corn really looked great at those times,” Brandt says.

Sharing the knowledge

Brandt has had to learn about soil health by trial and error on his farm. But he wants others to have an easier road. “I’m trying to pass on what we’ve learned here. I don’t want everyone to reinvent the wheel. I want people to see our failures and our successes,” he says.

“So many farmers have learned to sit on the tractor seat and let an agronomist make their decisions. I like to have farmers come and feel the soil here, dig in it, smell it, and see for themselves how healthy soil should look and feel. That’s when they get excited.”

That includes his banker. “It was hard to get him to understand what we are doing here until we got him out here. Now the quality of our soils and our reduced inputs show up on our balance sheets,” Brandt adds.

“And our landlords are tickled. We can show them how we’ve added organic matter to their soils and made their land more productive, and at the same time kept increasing their crop yields.”

End of quoted story

Some areas can also do the roller crimper on cover crops on the front of the tractor, while they pull a high residue no-till planter behind it.

Again, I don't have all the answers. But 200 million pounds of roundup[ per year in the US might be a problem.There has to be an effect of the bacterial population from that. Like I said in my 1st post, a gradual mind shift and production shift could greatly reduce inputs. Not saying ban them or never use them. I just think we need to minimize their use.

I know that there are plenty of farms here that still plow/disc every season, and spray fall, spring, and after planting.

If they could eliminate the plowing, and fall and spring herbicide apps, that would be a major step in the right direction, just like the guy in Ohio.

[Nan_PA_6b]

PH, do you have a link for the quotes from your last post?

Nan

[PureHarvest]

Originally Posted by Nan_PA_6b

PH, do you have a link for the quotes from your last post?

Nan

https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal...TELPRDB1166409

[NarnianGarden]

Originally Posted by Cole_Robbie

I

Another issue with regulation is that governments are national, but our food supply is international. We are eating food from countries where the governments struggle to maintain basic social order. It would be nice to think they regulate their ag chemicals, but that seems like wishful thinking to me. And thanks to our trade agreements, we are not allowed to ask any questions about imported produce. Banning a chemical from American farms does not remove it from our grocery stores, by any means.

That's one major reason to grow one's own food as much as possible, and buy organic whenever a purchase is necessary.

Even in our EU there are plenty of toxins allowed to be used in the agrimarket produce. Apples, pears and plums imported from France are known to be the most pesticide-laden fruits available, so I have stopped purchasing non-organic stuff from there. It's a shame really, the French dark plums are delicious, but I get symptoms and reactions as soon as I eat one..

That is why I grow and eat tomatoes of many colors, that way I can be assured there are no nasty surprises...

[Gerardo]

Posted this in other thread, and I'll include it here too, as it has to do with neonics.

Today my trees got a dose of cinnaneem (neem + cinnamon) and Manager (imidacloprid).

[bower]

Really enjoyed your posts PH, this is what makes it worth reading the forum, there's always something to learn! If I can give slugs and snails the bleahs with some radish I swear I'll plant em everywhere!!
Gerardo, I guess citrus is my only experience of systemics. Saw little lemon and lime trees at the HD one autumn and couldn't resist. They were perfect houseplants but then six months after, the red spider mites appeared on em! A sad tale, it seemed to do the deed until much time after purchase. (Of course I had no idea they had been treated until later, as well. I was not up to speed on the latest pesticide.) I guess like other insecticides it does create a dependency, and then it becomes a repeat business ad infinitum.
What is really sad is that this product expanded into every hort flower business in addition to the use on trees and other crops. Plant flower in your garden, kill your bees. Even as an organic gardener I would normally sometimes make impulse purchases of cute little plants I saw somewhere, never worrying that however they were grown or treated, they would soon clean up in my environment. But this stuff really is nasty and persistent and leaches into your soil as well.
I'm just glad I was too broke in recent years to buy whatever cute lil thing was on the market.

[Worth1]

Looks like the chickens came home to roost for all those alcohol burning tree hugging carbon footprint green planet Hollywood movie star following enthusiasts.
Rolling hills of beautiful green GMO Bio fuel pesticide ridden chemical corn.
This is what you get when you have people that think with emotion and ignorance, not facts and logic.
Big business will win every time and make you love it till the wine starts to sour.

How dare these rich uneducated jerks that can afford anything they want, live behind tall gaits and walls and 24 hour protection tell common folks how to live, protect or feed our loved ones.
By the way I have plenty of bees.
Bumble bees honey bees carpenter bees spiders lizards snakes frogs toads rabbits coons foxes possums armadillos you name it I have them all living here on my land.
You can bet if doped up drunken Hollywood foo foo had this stuff on his or her property they would call the exterminator.
Oh but wait the exterminator isn't popular anymore because they ganged up on him for sleeping with the help.
Too stupid not to @#%$ in his own house and make a living off of selling violence.
Worth

[GrowingCoastal]

Originally Posted by bower

Really enjoyed your posts PH, this is what makes it worth reading the forum, there's always something to learn! If I can give slugs and snails the bleahs with some radish I swear I'll plant em everywhere!!
Gerardo, I guess citrus is my only experience of systemics. Saw little lemon and lime trees at the HD one autumn and couldn't resist. They were perfect houseplants but then six months after, the red spider mites appeared on em! A sad tale, it seemed to do the deed until much time after purchase. (Of course I had no idea they had been treated until later, as well. I was not up to speed on the latest pesticide.) I guess like other insecticides it does create a dependency, and then it becomes a repeat business ad infinitum.
What is really sad is that this product expanded into every hort flower business in addition to the use on trees and other crops. Plant flower in your garden, kill your bees. Even as an organic gardener I would normally sometimes make impulse purchases of cute little plants I saw somewhere, never worrying that however they were grown or treated, they would soon clean up in my environment. But this stuff really is nasty and persistent and leaches into your soil as well.
I'm just glad I was too broke in recent years to buy whatever cute lil thing was on the market.

As well, these pesticides are not always used as they are supposed to be. I remember one story where someone used neonics to spray and didn't wait until the bloom period of the trees was over resulting in a massive bee kill with their dead bodies lying everywhere under the trees.

People are welcome to do as they wish on their own place but really, it is not fair to share with others who do not want it or don't even know they are 'sharing' because of the carelessness or thoughtlessness of others.

[Worth1]

My stuff is about 98% pesticide free unless it blows in from the wind.
I dont spray blooms.
My father had tons of fruit and nut trees and he used sevin dust and spray.
Never and I mean never did we spray during blooming season.
We had several bee hives with supers on them.
My opinions are based on my observations and fact not biased links papers and reports with agendas.
But dont take my word for it.

Just the other day I was listening to a guy and he sounded like Gospel it had to be true.
I got tired of trying to look up something he stated to see if it was true.
Couldn't find it anywhere, still looking.
Be careful what you hear, read and do.
It may not be true.

I will say right now I am not a big fan of the EU for several reasons I cant say here.
This does not mean some of the things they do aren't good.

Worth