By Dr Keith Dawson

THE LONG five-month harvesting and drilling campaign is finally drawing to a close, with the last wheat being drilled in less than ideal conditions and at high seed rates.

Some wheat is even being broadcast after beet to maintain rotational integrity. Oilseed rape and winter barley are looking well, as is the emerging rye. Despite wetter weather slowing wheat drilling, we have been generally happy with our harvest in Ukraine.

Now we must await what winter has to bring us, but not before the huge tonnage of beet has been lifted from the sides of the fields and transported to the factory. It is now official that the colder La Nin? has replaced the warmer El Nino, so global temperatures are now dropping and there is talk of a hard winter here.

Obviously, some traders feel there are issues for 2018, as we have locked in some good prices for both soya and oilseed rape recently for harvest 2018, based on South American mood. This is despite feeding more mouths than ever before in human history, with four consecutive near record global harvests.

Certainly Black Sea wheat is dominating export markets. Russia has increased its wheat harvest by 80% in recent years, partly as a response to sanctions.

Our soya from Ukraine is likely to head east to China and yields have lifted this year, although we are on the margins for its cultivation and a late harvest could be troublesome. Later varieties were higher yielding and well podded and our new flexible headers left less seed in the field this season. The boost that residual N from soya gives a following wheat crop is welcome.

Meanwhile, lest we forget, the war in the east of Ukraine continues, with 30 Russian attacks on young conscripts on the day I wrote this article. The abandoned cropland of Donbas has become one of the heaviest land-mined areas in the world with more civilians killed than Syria, Yemen and Afghanistan combined in the last year.

It is certain that we would not have been as successful in remediation of our land and creating jobs here without the unique herbicide glyphosate. This allowed us to clear the land of tumbledown weeds and couch, which had invaded the land, when the large Russian collectives were broken up on Ukraine gaining it’s independence.

Glyphosate continues to be critical to us in the management of minimum tillage for our cereals and rape, thus saving fuel, time and carbon loss from the soil, as it is for most farmers.

Despite some misguided reports, there are no real alternatives to it that are not more damaging to the environment and human health. ‘A ban on glyphosate will not save a single person from cancer,’ the New Scientist said recently.

It is nothing short of a disgrace that well fed, well heeled activists in the EU have turned the relicensing of glyphosate into a political football, rather than using an independent scientific assessment based on accurate and untainted evidence of risk and hazard. This presages further constraints on farming for little benefit.

Only one body, the IACR, used by the WHO, has found that glyphosate is ‘probably carcinogenic.’ All the other assessment bodies have found no such evidence, despite many peer reviewed studies. Even IACR/WHO have found it in the same risk group as coffee and sawdust.

Looking deeper into IACR’s data, Reuters News Agency have reported many last minute edits in the IACR report, changing conclusions and data to distort the conclusion against glyphosate. This scandalous report was published not long before the WHO appointed Robert Mugabe a ‘WHO goodwill ambassador,’ which was another ridiculous decision, rapidly u-turned within days due to the global outcry. Whilst the WHO do much fine work, these two instances are not their finest hour.

The waters of this IACR review became even murkier, recently, at a Californian litigation liability court. One of the main IACR glyphosate review committee members, Christopher Portier, was forced to admit in his own signed deposition and under cross examination, to receiving a six-figure sum from two ambulance-chasing law firms in the US trying to construct claims against glyphosate manufacturers.

This payment was made just nine days after the IACR report was published and is now part of the public record in the minutes of the litigation hearing. Prior to the release of the report, he had been working with plaintiff law firms suing Monsanto.

Before his appointment as the sole expert technical adviser on the IACR glyphosate review group, he acknowledged, in his deposition, that he had had no experience with nor had he worked on glyphosate. He has, however, published many anti-pesticide blogs as an activist.

This is as huge a conflict of interest as can be imagined and an absolute disgrace to such an important issue as food security and to such a hitherto respected body as the WHO.

On another note, I attended a Brexit conference, at UCD, in Dublin, last week and as noted before, the adverse effects of Brexit on Irish agriculture will be just as great as those in the UK. Perhaps more so.

After 45 years, the food industry north and south of the border is highly integrated, but UK trade with Ireland is three to four times that traded within Ireland itself. The rightful determination of the Irish government to veto any deal with a ‘hard’ physical infrastructure border between the north and the Republic may well be the rock upon which Brexit finally founders. No hard border, no ‘taking back control’.

One-third of Irish dairy exports go to the UK, including 82% of cheddar exports. Around 80% of the £800m cross border trade is by ‘small traders’ and an exemption is being considered for those. No complications or opportunity for corruption there!

Income for dairy and arable farmers is forecast to drop by 20% and cattle farmers by nearly double that, an average of 26% for all farming businesses in the Republic. If the UK does leave

the EU, there will be a €10.5bn budgetary deficit, which the Irish Farmers Association believe should be made good by higher EU taxes, good luck with that.

There is no doubt that there will be a lot of disruption to supply chains. Following the acquisition of Wholefoods in the US, by Amazon, who would have thought that Sainsburys would be talked of as their next target?

So Brexit truly is ‘The Undefined being negotiated by the Unprepared in order to get the Unspecified for the Uninformed’. With current Tory rebels arguing quite rightly there should be no set date on the UK B-Day, it is looking increasingly more like a continental bidet!