A new farmer survey demonstrates that farmers and growers have real concerns regarding the potential loss of azole fungicides.

In a recent survey of 400 farmers and growers, serious concerns were expressed at the viability and sustainability of key sectors of UK agriculture, if the European Commission was to implement proposed new legislation on endocrine disruption in a way that would result in the loss of key classes of crop protection products such as the azole fungicides.

Stefana Ailioaie, a spokesperson for Bayer CropScience said: “The survey represented over 130,000 hectares of cereals, 33,000 hectares of oilseed rape, and 1600 hectares of vegetables. Over 98% of farmers surveyed believed that the loss of azole fungicides would ‘seriously affect’ their businesses, 96% of them believing that it would result in a decrease in yields of cereals. Other concerns included reduced yields of oilseed rape and decreased vegetable production, ability to control Septoria, increasing costs of disease control and the dangers of diseases becoming resistant to other fungicides.”

Survey Results: Farmers were asked if they agreed to the following statements concerning the loss of azole fungicides; results expressed in %

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NFU plant health adviser Don Pendergrast said: “The results of this survey show that UK farmers and growers do understand the implications to them and their businesses of losing whole key classes of chemistry. This piece of legislation, if inappropriately implemented will not just affect azole fungicides, of course, but many other important crop protection products”.

The recently announced European Commission public consultation is looking for views on how to regulate chemicals in the environment in terms of their ability to interact with the endocrine (hormone) system.
If farmers, agronomists or anyone else involved in food production are concerned about this potential legislation then it is important that they convey their concerns during this public consultation.

The public consultation runs until the 16 January 2015 and can be found at http://ec.europa.eu/eusurvey/runner/ED-consultation. There is an opportunity to give information on a number of potential options as well as the legislation as a whole in section 4 of the on-line document. For further information and advice on completing the consultation document, Bayer CropScience has produced a question and answer document on the topic, as well as a blog post with further analysis of this farmer survey.