The Isle of Man Food and Drink Festival saw EcoVannin and its Green Centre partners present with games, competitions, demonstrations of solar gear, a petition, piles of handouts – and lots of local produce grown by gardener Tony Garland
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The Isle of Man Food and Drink Festival, organised by the Department for the Environment, Food and Agriculture, was a real treat.
EcoVannin and its Green Centre partners were there, with games, competitions, demonstrations of solar gear, a petition, piles of handouts – and lots of stunning local produce grown by gardener extraordinaireTony Garland.
In particular, the IoM Friends of the Earth team (smack in the middle of their hectically busy Fortnight of Action for Bees) were raising awareness of how important these, and other pollinators, are to our food chain.
Without them, a fair number of the vegetables, fruit and herbs that you have on your dinner plate would be missing.
It’s not just the obvious ones like strawberries and apples that spring to mind. Other things like broccoli, cabbage, onions, cucumbers, tomatoes and carrots also need to be pollinated by various different types of bee and other insects.
But many bees (and there are more than 250 different species within the British Isles) are struggling because of a variety of problems which I touched on last week.
One of the chief of these is, as readers will know, certain types of pesticides known as ‘neonicotinoids’, which – while not believed to be heavily used in agriculture on the island – certainly turn up in garden centre products and find their way into peoples’ gardens.
These chemical compounds are neurotoxic to bees, especially the wild bees that do so much of our pollination. This can mean, among other things, that they become unable to navigate, stop foraging for themselves and die prematurely.
So it was good to see that one of the main manufacturers of pesticides known to harm bees – Bayer – is at last taking steps to remove some of these nasties from their most popular products, starting next year.
The particular neonic they’re getting rid of is Thiacloprid, and it’s found in both Provado and Baby Bio, both of which are familiar to many gardeners.
It’s replacing the thiacloprid element of Baby Bio and Provado with another chemical known as a pyrethroid, in this case deltamethrin.
This is great news and in the meantime many gardeners, alerted to the dangers of thiacloprid by this news, will doubtless stop using them right away, until the reformulated products are available.
Indeed, more and more are realising that if they want to support wildlife and have thriving biodiversity in their gardens, it’s best to try and avoid spraying chemical insecticides altogether, except in extreme cases.
As regular readers know, certain neonics are already banned in the UK for agricultural use. But as Thiacloprid isn’t one of them, it’s still available and actively used in agriculture across the UK,though there are hopes it will be banned soon.
Bayer neonic pesticides Calypso (used in orchards) and Biscaya (some vegetable crops and oil seed rape), which also contain Thiacloprid, are pretty widely used across the UK.
Bayer’s action is being seen as a pre-emptive move, and the company has been quoted as saying: ‘Neonicotinoids have become a contentious issue. It is likely that the regulations and legislation around thiacloprid will change in the near future, and Bayer has decided to be proactive about changing its products to meet the demands of these changes.’
So far, so good. But in the meantime, if you’re concerned about supporting the fuzzy little fellows who keep the food on our plates, you might not want to wait until 2016.
Why not investigate the many alternatives to neonics right now, which range from switching products, to companion planting?
You’ll learn lots, avoid damaging our bee population and have less chemically-infused produce to show for it, too.