Herbicide decision staggers farmers

A last-ditch appeal against the EC’s refusal to relicense asulam – best known as the product Asulox – failed this week.

The NFU said it would go for an emergency authorisation, from the UK Chemicals Regulation Directorate, to continue the use of the product for a “breathing period”.

But at the moment, advertising and sale of Asulox is supposed to stop at the end of this year and use of stored supplies by the end of 2012.

The NFU’s head of policy services, Andrew Clark, said: “The loss of asulam will lead to serious problems. Unchecked bracken growth gives rise to a whole host of difficulties including negative impacts on biodiversity as well as public and animal health issues arising from the toxicity and carcinogenic nature of the plant and the fact that it can act as a habitat for disease-carrying ticks.”

George Winn Darley, vice chairman of the Moorland Association, a land owner and manager based in Stamford Bridge and with interests on the North York Moors, said the ban threatened to undo work on which taxpayers’ money had already been spent. Some environmental schemes included payments for bracken control. In some cases, that would be a 10-year project, and abandonment halfway through would allow the bracken to come back, at the expense of heather, bilberry and other plants more friendly to grouse and sheep.

He said bracken control efforts over the past 10 years covered at least 65 square miles.

Where ploughing was possible, it was the best line of attack. But Asulox was an essential tool in a lot of upland and woodland.

Maeve Whyte, who works in the Brussels office of the NFU, said the British tradition of managed moorland was not common in the rest of Europe, so there had been insufficient support for a UK application to give the makers of Asulox extra time to prove their product safe.