Guy Smith of the National Farmers’ Union says (Letters, 4 June) that there has been “no intensification of agriculture in the UK for 25 years”, and that government figures show pesticide use has been “significantly reduced”. No they don’t. Government figures show the number of active substances – the actual chemicals applied to three major UK crops (wheat, onions and potatoes) – have increased between six and 18 times (that is, between 600% and 1,800%) from the 1970s to 2014. And as recent Guardian investigations have found, there has been a significant growth in large-scale pig and poultry production, and recently you revealed the arrival, albeit just a few at the moment, of US-style beef lots in the UK (Report, 30 May). UK dairy herds have been getting ever larger over recent years, with the growth of dairy systems where the cows are kept indoors all their life, with feed brought to them, and no grazing on grass. These are all undesirable trends for English farmers, squeezed by rising costs and falling prices, and as we face government policy that rightly wants us to compete on the world market on the basis of high animal welfare, high environmental standards and high quality.
Peter Melchett
Policy director, Soil Association
• Guy Smith of the National Farmers’ Union tells only half the story when he says pesticide use in the UK has been significantly reduced. What he is referring to is the weight of pesticides, and on that point alone he is correct. In 1990 the weight of active substances applied was 34,500 tonnes compared to 17,1800 tones in 2015. But weight is not the significant factor. Toxicity is. Many of the pesticides on the market now are more toxic than they used to be and so farmers apply less weight of pesticides to do the same job.
What Guy Smith fails to mention is that the total area of UK farmland treated with pesticides has increased sharply, almost doubling between 1990 and 2015. Crops are now commonly treated with 20 different pesticides in a season. There is little doubt that such increase has had a significant effect on the loss of biodiversity in our farmed landscape.
A radical overhaul of our farming system, rather than comforting platitudes from the NFU, is required to reverse this trend.
Roger Mainwood
Wivenhoe, Essex
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