Danish farmers in plan to cut pesticide use

Farmers in Denmark are working with their national advisory service to reduce pesticide use. John Harvey spoke to Poul Henning Petersen, a senior adviser with the service, who was the guest speaker during the November 2003 PAN Europe network members’ conference.

Denmark’s immediate priority in its pesticide reduction programme is to stop groundwater pollution. ‘Hardly any of our drinking water comes from surface waters, so it will be essential for us to try to prevent point source pollution reaching groundwater over the next five years of our action plan,’ said Poul Henning Petersen, a senior adviser with the Danish agricultural advisory service.
    Mr Petersen was the guest speaker during the PAN Europe network members’ conference in Copenhagen. During his speech, Mr Petersen said the third pesticide action plan – lasting six years from 2004 to 2009 – would be the most challenging yet. The advisory service’s campaign on point source pollution would be aimed at places on farms where farmers are either washing out spray equipment or filling it with concentrate. ‘If that is spilled on to the ground, it can very easily leach into groundwater,’ said Mr Petersen. ‘We are convinced that better handling of pesticides on the farm can avoid this kind of pollution.’
    One reason for farmers to co-operate is that if they can drastically reduce point source pollution, it may mean that fewer farms will need to join the treatment frequency index (TFI) scheme, the corner stone of Denmark’s pesticide reduction policy. The TFI is simply defined as a measure of the average number of times a field can be treated at normal dose rates. Over successive government pesticide action plans, the TFI has gradually been reduced.
    It is very easy to show what effect the TFI has had on reducing pesticide use because every company which imports or produces pesticides has to register their annual sales with the Danish Environmental Protection Agency. Between 1997 and 2002, Mr Petersen said use had reduced by 20%, with the TFI falling from 2.5 to 2.04. But securing another reduction to 1.7 during the third plan by 2009 would be more difficult. ‘For one thing, there is no longer any carrot for farmers. And for another, the size of farms is increasing and when that happens pesticide use can increase as farmers are less inclined to work out dose rates for particular fields, for example.’
    So why did farmers volunteer to join the TFI scheme in the first place? Mainly because the advisory service could show them that they would suffer no economic consequences from doing so. There was an even more direct financial interest, too. In Denmark, about 60 regional farming unions own the advisory service, so it makes sense to use it. There is virtually no other source of advice: the service has 3,000 advisers, with 400 dealing with plant production and crop protection. By contrast, there are only about 20 crop consultants operating in Denmark.
    Danish farmers also have to pay a pesticides tax, levied at 50% on insecticides and 25% on herbicides, fungicides and growth regulators. The chemical companies pay the tax which is shown by a small stamp on every packet or container sold. This raises 350 million Danish Krone (around £32 million) each year: 250 million is returned to farmers through tax breaks on property. About 100 million is used for research, and about 3.5 million of this is used on the pesticide reduction programme. ‘We do not receive that money automatically,’ said Mr Petersen. ‘But we do have it for the six years of the current action plan.’
    Between 2000 and 2003, about 4,500 farms joined the programme. In the third plan up to 2009, Mr Petersen estimated that up to 1,500 might join each year, but some of these would only stay for two years or so, giving a total over the period of about 10,000 farmers. ‘That is about a third of all arable farmers in Denmark,’ he said. ‘But it’s a much greater proportion of the cropped area because it is mainly professional farmers who join the programme, and they have the larger farms.’
    They will implement the TFI advice they receive from the advisory service. ‘When a farmer has a strategy for spraying crops, he can see whether he will be using a higher dose or one which corresponds to the TFI,’ Mr Petersen explained. ‘When our advisers discuss with the farmer about whether he is going to spray or not, there will always be an economic calculation about whether he will have a net return from spraying.’
    One treatment the service advises farmers not to use is growth regulators in winter wheat. ‘Their use in Denmark has been quite low, but they are still used. From now on, we will explain to farmers that it is uneconomic to use these products so they should try to avoid them. Then it is up to the farmer to decide what he does.’ Mr Petersen added that modern wheat varieties have a strong straw so it is unnecessary to use growth regulators in Denmark’s climate.
    Overall, the gap between the farmers using the least amount of pesticide during the action plans and those using the most is not very big. The best farms are using dose rates which are 10% lower than the target TFI. So does Mr Petersen think that Denmark’s action plans would work elsewhere in the EU? ‘It’s a difficult question. It is very important to have an advisory service combined with a TFI so that, by working with farmers, you can plan the level of pesticide use. In both the UK and Germany, for example, I think the chemical companies have a big influence on what kind of chemical products and which dose rates farmers are going to use. So I think it would be difficult to do what we have done in those countries.’
    A strong, independent advisory service which has farmers’ confidence is important. ‘We are in a very strong position,’ said Mr Petersen. ‘We have done field trials to show which doses are the most economical for farmers. We have something like 20 years of results showing what is best for the farmer and not what is the most efficient control for weeds or pests.’ Up to the end of last year, the advisory service was subsidised by the government. But from this year, the subsidy – worth about 4% of the service’s budget – has been removed by the liberal government. ‘I think we will be able to trim our organisation to fit life without the subsidy,’ said Mr Petersen.

Poul Henning Petersen can be contacted at the National Department of Plant Production of the Danish Agricultural Advisory Service, Udkaersvej 15, Skejby, DK8200, Aarhus, Denmark, php@lr.dk, www.lr.dk

[This article first appeared in Pesticides News No. 63, March 2004, page 10]