Over the next couple of days pesticide campaigner Georgian Downs is appearing in the High Court as part of a legal challenge against DEFRA. 

She argues that the Government’s only method of assessing the risks to public health from crop-spraying is based on the model of a ‘bystander’, in which it assumes that there will only be occasional, short-term exposure to the spray cloud at the time of the application only, from a single pass of a sprayer. It also assumes exposure will only be to one individual pesticide at any time.

Ms. Downs has continued to argue throughout her campaign that this model does not address residents like herself, who are repeatedly exposed to mixtures of pesticides and other chemicals, throughout every year, and in many cases, like her own situation, for decades.

I mean this as no offence too anyone but I can't understand why anyone who doesn't like things involved with farming to the point that they complain about things live next too fields or a farm. I am waiting for a call in the next few days for a neighbour asking if we can move the wrapped bales as he doesn't like the colour green of the wrap. We only put them up there if we run out of room here. Where before he brought and moved in to the house we had got bales up there he knew it was a working farmyard yet he still complains about everything and thinks its safe and a good climbing frame for his children to clamber over all the wrapped haylage bales and the straw bales.

We have had complaints about our dogs barking at the postman, fields being worked after dark and, in one case, my ten year old daughter being told off by a lady rider for talking to a sheep because it frightened her horse.

When asking that their dogs not chase our sheep told, "Our dogs are pedigree and worth more than your sheep." and, when asking for cars to be moved from a gateway to let the tractor out, told that we were persecuting them and they would have the police on us!

One of our new neighbours who announced how pleased he was to move to the open countryside has just put up a six foot fence around his property.

These were not all the same people so it seems more and more of those who move to the country are somehow missing the point.

Ours are all pleasnt enough its just the requests that cause I to have trouble keeping a straigh face sometimes. Well they all pleasant enough but two who were a bit rude but after school and college they seemed pretty poor insults as I have heard much better ones.

Georgina Downs pesticides victory overturned. Appeal court has just ruled in DEFRA's favour 

Here's what Peter Kendall had to say:

While I have every sympathy for the frustrations of farmers over trivial neighbourly interventions, please spare a thought for my daughter who was sprayed accidentally by an operant with a cocktail of herbicides while walking in the grounds of her university.  She suffered immediate temporary loss of vision and within days severe ill health problems, from which only now some 18 months later is she beginning to recover. 

That was a very nasty incident, redcliff and will have caused you all great angst during your daughter's recovery - we would hope that you have achieved some sort of recompense against the university and/or the sprayer operator but we do not know the precise circumstances of the matter. Hope all is well now.

As a certificated spraying farmer I have to thank DEFRA for going to Appeal against Downs, and also thank the Judges for their judgement, and hope we can get on with the job, within current law and codes of practice, without further interference.