The pressure is on for crop producers across Europe to reduce the impact of pesticides on the environment and none feel it more than the wine producers of France. Adam Clarke went to find out what’s being done to reduce the impact of their intensive spray programmes.

In arable fields, pesticides are forced down towards their target from boom sprayers, making it less prone to miss and finish in the wrong place.

But in the vineyards and orchards of France, air-atomised sprayers are used on 70% of the area, blasting crop protection products on to crops and into the air.

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This dramatically increases spray drift and the risk of products damaging the environment and contaminating water.

Reducing this risk is key to avoiding further product restrictions and agrichemical manufacturers and researchers are working to improve French attitudes towards pesticide application.

Syngenta formulation and application expert Michel Leborgne told Farmers Weekly that the widespread use of air-atomiser sprayers is largely down to habit and the high-work rates that they can provide.

“Also, price is a big factor for farmers – with less drift-prone machines being more expensive – and machinery manufacturers are driven by sales.

“The problem is, products will get banned if they are found in water and not the machine that applied it, so we need to find a way of improving the application techniques on farm and prevent further losses,” he added.

Silsoe Research Institute (SRI) has been the centre for independent pesticide application research carried out in the UK and its French equivalent is situated on the northern fringe of France’s eighth largest city, Montpellier.

As part of the National Research Institute of Science and Technology of Environment and Agriculture (IRSTEA), the Montpellier centre focuses on the interaction of agriculture with the environment.

About 120 full time staff are employed by the government funded organisation, with a further 100 researchers carrying out PhD’s, under private contracts or funded by the EU.

Ariane Vallet, a senior researcher at the institute, told Farmers Weekly on the recent Farm Sprayer Operator of the Year winner’s trip that in the past four or five years their application research has been driven by reducing the impact of pesticides on the environment, following the implementation of various European directives and Ecophyto 2018 – a French plan aimed at halving pesticide use by 2018.

“If you are applying products more efficiently, it will reduce the harm that pesticides cause in the environment and we are also looking at improving training for those using pesticides in France.”

Joint director at IRSTEA, Bernadette Ruelle, explained that the research centre works closely with agrichemical manufacturers, sprayer manufacturers and other development institutes to find better ways to apply pesticides to grape vines.

Grape vines are a pesticide hungry crop, requiring between seven to 20 applications of fungicide to control diseases such as powdery mildew, downy mildew and botrytis – depending on region and season – along with one to two insecticides each year.

In the past, the information on which application method is best to apply these treatments has been limited, but Ms Ruelle and her team are trying to test different sprayers to see which is best.

“We are looking at both product deposition and efficacy and also which is the best for minimising drift and communicate this to growers,” she explained.

“There is a need to get all the parties around the table and talk to one another, which is what we are trying to do as part of the project.”

Artificial vines

To measure the merit of the various vine-spraying techniques, the institute has developed an artificial vine, which is made up of plastic squares to represent leaves on mobile sections.

These can be manipulated in number and height to simulate various vine growth stages through the season and allow consistent and fair tests for all vineyard sprayers, with field tests often inconsistent due to variable conditions.

Tunnel recirculating sprayers have already been proven to use about 40% less chemical and reduce drift, but the higher cost of such equipment puts farmers off the technology.

Ms Vallet, a specialist in the mechanics of pesticide application, has also been looking at what is happening in and around nozzles and how it effects deposition in the field and the surrounding area.

It has been proven that low drift, air induction nozzles not only decrease the amount of pesticide being lost to drift, but actually improve deposition on the vines too.

“We need to promote its use and perhaps we need to find a way of subsidising the uptake of this sort of technology in the vineyards,” said Ms Vallet.

Boosting biodiversity in vineyards

In the southern reaches of the Rhone valley a Syngenta, demonstration farm is aiming to show growers that grapes and biodiversity can grow in synergy.

In an area famous for its rosé wine, Chateau Saint-Louis la Perdrix, near Bellgarde in the Languedoc-Roussillon region of southern France grows about 50ha of vines, along with 7ha of olive trees on stony red clay soils.

The agrichemical giant has a network of 13 French farms growing a range of crops and aim to promote best agricultural practice to protect the environment and promote sustainable farming.

Their research in vineyards such as Chateau Saint-Louis la Perdrix shows that there was an abundance of flora and fauna, even before practices changed to encourage it.

Olivier Cluzel, part of Syngenta’s stewardship team for the south of France, said despite not having non-crop areas and hedgerows across the farm they had found 114 species of plant, 20 species of beneficial insect, 28 bird species – including two rare – and three different mammals.

“The question is, how do we further improve the biodiversity within the vineyard?

“We have found that changing soil management, establishing margins and hedgerows are the most important things,” said Mr Cluzel.

Min-till

In between the neat, straight rows of vines, some of which are more than 50-years-old, growers usually cultivate to control weeds, but leaving bare soil increases the risk of run-off that causes pesticide pollution and soil erosion, particularly on steeper slopes.

The farm has been cultivating every other row for the past ten years, allowing natural plant species usually considered weeds to build in the uncultivated strips.

Mr Cluzel explained that this has provided an alternative habitat within the crop and boosted the beneficial insects that aid the grower in pest control. Tillage has also been stopped 1m from the field edge to encourage small birds.

“These are the only things that you can implement within the crop plots that encourage biodiversity and earthworms have significantly increased with less cultivation too,” he added.

Managing margins

The Chateau Saint-Louis la Perdrix vineyard is in close proximity to a drinking water source and has a network of ditches running through the fields.

Although it is compulsory to have 5m margins around these watercourses, the farm has established larger 10m grass strips and planted hedgerows adjacent to them using 12 local species of small trees or shrub.

Mr Cluzel said that these are selected to grow the same height as the crop to catch any spray drift and provide maximum benefit for the bird species present in the area, particularly the partridge from which the chateau takes its name.

The hedgerow species, which are easy to maintain, combined with a 10m grass margin is known to reduce pollution from sediment and drift by 80%, so is effective at preventing water pollution.

“In the field the farmer needs to produce plentiful, high-quality crops, but it is around the margins where they can make a real difference to biodiversity,” said Mr Cluzel.

The cost to the grower can be a sticking point, with no support payments available for establishing hedgerows and only 5m margins compulsory.

However, Syngenta’s Michel Leborgne believes that it is an important public relations exercise in an industry that is very popular as a tourist attraction across France.

“We need to show that farmers are doing the right thing for the environment by choosing the right practices. It is one of the few farming sectors where we can get face to face with the customer at the cellar door,” he explained.