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kenneal - lagger wrote:Are neonics implicated in some way, or pesticides in general or is climate change the culprit?

kenneal - lagger wrote:I've just seen that Bayer is proposing to take over Monsanto to form a monster corporation which could control sales of seed, fertiliser and pesticides to farmers from a monopoly position.

The new data was gathered in nature reserves across Germany

emordnilap wrote:Insect numbers down by 75% in 25 years

The new data was gathered in nature reserves across Germany

So it's a conservative estimate.

Figures and statistics like this do little to change attitudes. Move along now, nothing to see here.

Another way of sampling insects – car windscreens – has often been anecdotally used to suggest a major decline, with people remembering many more bugs squashed on their windscreens in the past.

“I think that is real,� said Goulson. “I drove right across France and back this summer – just when you’d expect your windscreen to be splattered all over – and I literally never had to stop to clean the windscreen.�

emordnilap wrote:Insect numbers down by 75% in 25 years

The new data was gathered in nature reserves across Germany

So it's a conservative estimate.

Figures and statistics like this do little to change attitudes. Move along now, nothing to see here.

As one organic farmer to another, I would like to draw your attention to this alarming article about the loss of 75% of flying insects in 25 years

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... ct-numbers

and the link in that article to the advice from Prof Ian Boyd, one of the UK’s chief scientific advisers, saying that "global regulations (on pesticide use) have ignored the impacts of 'dosing whole landscapes’ and must change."

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... -scientist

This last article also links to one showing that farms could slash their pesticide use without affecting yields

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... ch-reveals

and to one siting the UN report which denounces the myth that pesticides are essential to feed a fast-growing global population.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... -the-world

Please could you support votes for the banning, and campaign for the continued banning and the extension of any current bans, on pesticide use in the UK and Europe.

Conventional organic farming has been carried on, largely successfully, for thousands of years. Novel synthetic chemical farming is an invention of the last few decades and the results of this disastrous experiment with our environment are now becoming known. No doubt the chemical industry will poor scorn on this science, as we are only now finding Monsanto has been doing, but "they would, wouldn't they" as they have billions of dollars of business to lose.

But what are billions of dollars compared with the loss of the web of life which supports the human population of the planet?

In total, we found residues of 123 different pesticides, including 43 suspected endocrine (hormone system) disruptors. Imazalil, a ‘probable carcinogen’ and developmental toxin, was the most frequently detected pesticide. Second most frequent, and present in a fifth of all samples, was chlorpyrifos, a pesticide which has almost no permitted uses in the UK. It is well documented to have negative impacts on children’s cognitive development.

Of the 2238 samples tested by the government, two-thirds contained residues of multiple pesticides and large numbers of different residues were detected in individual samples. For example, one sample of apples from 2016 was found to contain the residues of eleven different pesticides.