Sheep Spray
Until recently I had some hives of bees in the orchards of a farmer who is a major cider apple grower. One day, borrowing the farmer’s truck to drive to the beehives through the muddy orchards, I noticed some empty cardboard pesticide packaging in the back of the truck. Nosy by nature and worried about my bees, I investigated, and it turned out to be an organophosphate chemical called Diazinon he had been using for treating sheep scab. The warnings on the boxes made clear that it was extremely toxic to wildlife and should in particular not be allowed to get into watercourses. After use, the warnings said, the residue should either be sent off to a disposal contractor or, believe it or not, ‘spread on a designated area of the farm’. Somehow that phrase stayed with me, although in fact that is exactly what farmers do on their fields all the time, often several times.
This chemical is used to treat sheep in mobile spray baths where the solution is supposedly retained in the trough that the sheep walk through. If after use it is to be collected for disposal this requires a level of care and commitment to environmental protection that many farmers don’t seem to me to display. (One farmer round here, when there was an amnesty for the notorious banned organochlorine pesticides, which were to be delivered to a collection point, was reputedly cussed enough to dig a pit on the hillside and bury them, from where they without doubt continue to drain into a well-known and loved Herefordshire river). I failed to find any disposal contractors in a trawl of the yellow pages and the internet, though it is possible that they exist. (Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence but, whether or not, the common practice round here is to put the spray waste in the slurry spreader and spread it on the farm).
The Code of Practice for disposing of pesticide waste says “When using pesticides in agriculture, you can only dispose of the dilute waste onto soil or grass (either directly or fed by the drainage from a hard surface) under the terms of an authorisation under the Groundwater Regulations issued by the Environment Agency. To keep to the Landfill Regulations you must not use a single site in this way more often than once a year. The land you choose for this purpose must: – be able to absorb the volume of liquid to be disposed of onto it without run-off or leaving puddles: – result in the smallest possible risk to wildlife and watercourses: – protect groundwater (by not allowing the pesticide to reach the water table): – present the smallest possible risk to septic tanks, field drains or sewerage systems:- and – where necessary, be signposted and fenced to keep people and livestock out.”
The idea that the farmer may be able to assess the risk to wildlife at a particular location, or know enough about the local geology to predict if the chemicals will reach the water table, is frankly laughable, and the only function of this Code of Practice is to prevent gross contamination incidents which might attract unwelcome publicity. The decline in invertebrates in rivers caused by gradual contamination, leading to fish starvation and hence to starvation for herons or otters or kingfishers, will be more subtle and less easy to prove provided farmers keep to the Code of Practice, so that the pesticide residues are released slowly. If kingfishers disappear, it will not be possible to pin this on particular farmers or to identify a specific pollution incident, but the contamination of the ecosystem may persist for years.
I found out later, talking to one of my favourite farmers a bit up-country from here, that when sheep farmers buy this chemical they have to complete a registration form which concerns itself with the designated part of the farm on which the chemical waste can be spread. His spot was on top of a hilly part of the farm adjacent to the common grazings, near a steep slope down to a tributary of another well-known border river, itself a tributary of the dismally polluted River Wye. I don’t suppose, in that rainy border country, it is very long before the chemical finds its way into the river.
You would think that such lax regulations should cause no inconvenience to farmers, so I was quite astonished when he told me that some farmers have found a way around them. Diazenon is also used to spray carrots to control the carrot fly. Bought in this form there is no requirement to register and to comply with disposal regulations, because when this chemical is called carrot-fly spray it is sprayed directly onto the fields anyway, and if sheep farmers in the borders are buying carrot fly spray but not growing carrots I don’t suppose ‘the ministry’ has noticed. But it is less likely to be noticed when a farmer is careless when disposing of the residue because there will be no record of his having bought it in the first place. This also has the advantage that it may be more difficult to trace the widespread use of Diazinon by farmers and gamekeepers to ‘lace’ carcasses in order to illegally poison ravens, which are a protected species, with collateral damage to hen harriers, red kites and buzzards and any other raptors and scavengers in the area. In 2018, for example, 10 dead ravens and a crow and parts of a dead lamb were found on a farm near Beguildy in Powys. Government toxicology tests confirmed that the lamb carcase had been laced with Diazinon. It is hard to tell how widespread this practice is on sheep runs and grouse moors, though we know from a recent study that 72% of tagged hen harriers died on grouse moors. I suspect Diazinon has been used to poison badgers too.
Organophosphates are very dangerous chemicals. The alternative sheep scab treatment is an injection of a medication such as Ivermectin, which seems as far as I can see to be somewhat less harmful, not least because it is injected into the body and doesn’t end up sprayed on some field or hillside, though it will be excreted and thus contaminate land where the sheep graze. Injection is unpopular with farmers because it takes longer and is harder work. Injection requires care and attention to individual sheep, the spray baths chiefly involve dogs and shouting and waving sticks about. In spite of the condition known as Dipper’s flu that farm workers get after using organophosphate dips, and the growing evidence that Gulf War Syndrome was caused by organophosphates, and all the evidence linking organophosphate use, particularly in sheep farmers, with depression disorders leading to suicide, and a nasty long list of conditions such as brain and nerve problems, cancer, fertility issues, high blood sugar levels and so on, farmers prefer to use organophosphate dips because it is easier and quicker. Hard not to wonder if contact with organophosphate treatments affects the brain.
But we as a society are also behaving stupidly. Our governments are implicated in a very dangerous cyclical process, whereby the manufacturers introduce a pesticide, claiming to have demonstrated that it is ‘safe if used as instructed’, (a phrase which in the chemical industry is code for ‘very harmful’), and such chemicals easily get authorisation from governments whose attitude is either complacent or complicit. When environmental problems or human health problems start to appear it can take decades of campaigning by conservationists before the dangers of such pesticides begin to be recognised by the authorities. Usually the patent has expired by then anyway, and it will serve the interests of the chemical companies to have new patented chemicals ready to replace any banned chemicals. The banned chemicals will continue to be sold overseas, and the chemical roundabout will keep on turning.
The interval between launching and banning a pesticide can be as much as 50 years. The organochloride DDT was introduced in 1945. Its effects on ecosystems were first exposed by Rachel’s Carson’s ‘Silent Spring’ in 1965, but it was not banned in the US until 1974, not banned in the UK until 1986, and was only banned worldwide in 2001. It still persists in arctic ecosystems.
Neonicotinoids, a controversial class of pesticides that beekeepers have been protesting about for 20 years or more, that are now eventually banned in Europe, took a relatively quick 30 years to get to that point, though the UK seemed reluctant to commit to banning them earlier this year and flirted with the idea of allowing them to be used on sugar beet. These pesticides have had devastating impacts on a wide range of insects, and thus of course on all those birds you don’t see in your garden any more, though it may have been their damage to honey bees in particular that led to their being banned in Europe. But it is likely that the manufacturers were already preparing replacements for neonicotinoids, writing the safety data designed to reassure government agencies that they are safe (if used as instructed). We may well then have to go through the same dreary cycle of discovering that these new chemicals cause fresh harms to us and to the environment, and have to watch the destruction for years to come before governments reluctantly accept the evidence once again. Meanwhile the EU and the UK tolerate the export of thousands of tons of banned neonicotinoids to countries outside Europe. You wonder what planet they are on.
Loved your Olchon Valley missive, I finally walked the cat's back this autumn, it being some way from Sugarloaf where I have resided since 2007. Me? I'm a mere newcomer, born & bred in the Sussex Countryside.