30 July 2024. Paul McIntosh, Pulse Australia and WeedSmart.
After being in our agricultural industry as an agronomic advisor for nigh on 45 years now, I have learnt a lot, as you would in any role.
My major learnings along with the rest of Australia, is the zero till or conservation farming techniques we have adopted since the early 1980’s.
Benefits aplenty as we all know like preserving and improving soil structure, huge reductions of erosion by high winds or intense rainstorm events and of course the big one is moisture accumulation for future crops.
Which is why we need to be able to retain critical herbicides like Glyphosate in our farming systems.
I did an ABC radio interview yesterday talking about Glyphosate and why it is important to us in the farming industry. Not the first talk I have done on radio or the media in general, on defending (is the term I would use) the availability and use patterns we have adopted and refined over the last 40 odd years in our conservation farming revolution.
Yesterday’s Melbourne court case result won’t be the last time I address the question of the safe use of Glyphosate no doubt.
As usual I mentioned the home garden market use of Glyphosate and how over some years the applied quantity of active ingredient is much more in suburbia, than in our Aussie broadacre farming scene.
I also highlighted the fact of my roadside chat to one of those home garden persons recently, spraying a Glyphosate mixture from their pump-up sprayer in shorts and thongs. Now I cannot talk to everybody around Australia using these weekend spraying methods, however I can defend our professional use pattern of all our pesticide application processes.
I certainly got a few shots away on this live ABC radio interview (that is another level of getting your words correct first time) about how our farming systems have grasped the use of Optical Spot Sprayers, with the result of our knockdown herbicides has had huge savings in chemical applied to our fallow paddocks.
Once again, I leave you all with a challenge to get it right for all our pesticide application processes including the paperwork, the safety to operators, plus also the flora and fauna around our farms and paddocks.
On a final note, herbicide resistance has not gone away, so the WeedSmart Big 6 should be a big part of your ethos as well.
That’s all folks.
Local government guidepost spraying with Glyphosate.