MORE data surrounding herbicide safety will be critical in winning the critical battle for social licence for crop protection products according to a leading crop researcher returning from a study tour looking at global attitudes to glyphosate.
Harm van Rees, CropFacts, said concepts adopted abroad, such as Argentina's pest risk assessment tool, would be a valuable means for the grains industry to quantify concepts such as toxicity and ongoing sustainability to demonstrate the pros and cons of various products.
"The Argentines have been collecting data since 1987 and that demonstrates the impact of herbicides, insecticides and fungicides on both human health and the environment," Dr van Rees said at last month's Birchip Cropping Group trials review day.
He said this data could either be used to decide to phase out use of certain products with poor ratings or utilised to help back arguments to retain certain herbicides in the face of poor public perception.
"The obvious one is something like glyphosate, you could show it has a relatively low rating in terms of danger to human health, even allowing for the potential links with lymphoma," he said.
"You would probably compare it to an alternative product like paraquat, which is banned in a lot of jurisdictions, and you could see that it would have a higher footprint than glyphosate, and highlight that if there were calls to ban glyphosate."
"Whether you use a model exactly like what they use in Argentina or not there is a clear message there, we need to be collecting all the data we can and making sense of it.
"If we do end up finding that something is not safe or not sustainable then it will help shape our decisions moving forward."
The Argentine researchers said the research tool, based on World Health Organisation data, helped identify whether pesticide use in particular crops was sustainable.
"We identified time trends for both pesticide impact and the ecoefficiency of modal pesticide profiles," said lead researcher Diego Ferraro in a paper on the project.
"By the end of the time series, soybean showed a pesticide impact four times greater than maize crop in the studied area," he said.
"However, the time trend in the subperiod (2012-2019) showed a sustainable pattern of pesticide use in soybean crop, with an improvement in its ecoefficiency.
"Oppositely, maize showed a relatively constant ecoefficiency value during most of the time series, suggesting a possible path towards an unsustainable cropping system."
Dr Ferraro said this demonstrated that maize producers would have to work to find a more efficient and sustainable model of pesticide management.
Dr van Rees said a similar rating system for particular products in particular crops could help inform Australian growers in their pesticide decisions.
He said he saw a natural fit to conduct the research required to run the necessary research with farming systems groups across the country.
"I like the idea of long-term research in this area of observing pesticide use we could not only look at issues such as toxicity and sustainability but things like residue levels in the soil, I don't think there has been a lot of work in this area.
"You could look every season and measure what is in the soil and that would be invaluable data."
"If it indicates that we need to change, then that is good that we know, if it doesn't then it will be a valuable tool to help us promote our sustainability credentials."
"Being able to demonstrate that we are running systems that are environmentally sustainable will be a key part of Australia retaining our position as a major grain exporter."