This fungal disease loves tomatoes and other nightshade plants such as peppers, eggplants, and potatoes. What Is Blight?īlight is always the uninvited guest at the garden party and can appear in a few different forms at various times in the growing season. Once it appears, blight can be difficult to eradicate, but you can use a homemade, organic solution to help slow the spread. The dreaded yellowing and brown spotting of the lower leaves were the first signs. Potatoes are tested by Pesticides Residue in Food (PRIF) who produce a quarterly report.After a very humid start to the summer, I discovered blight on some of my tomato plants in the garden. I am in despair of any rational thought and analysis from the BBC. What have we farmers done to deserve this ignorant slander from the BBC whose motto is "Inform, educate and entertain", I think not. There can be no excuse, it was at best lazy programming made even worse by being packaged up as “honest”, the halo over the “o” was the last straw. None of the above would take any effort to research yet the BBC chose to portray a wholly false image of the farmers who produce the Great British Potato. The very few samples that are found to have measurable residues of more than one chemical are carefully assessed for any cumulative issues. MRL’s are set at least 100 times below what could be considered a health risk. Modern chemical analysis can detect parts-per-billion concentrations, or even parts-per-trillion ranges, Looking back over these quarterly reports it is clear that at least a half of the crop had no measurable residue and almost 100% is below the level expected by an application at the safe recommended rates ( known as the MRL ). Potatoes are tested by Pesticides Residue in Food (PRIF) who produce a quarterly report. Again nonsense, we use a range of fungicides to prevent resistance building up thereby reducing the number of applications and rate of fungicide required. The programme made great play on the fact that we use multiple different fungicides and that this posses an additional unknown danger which was not tested for. The chemical control used works on the basis of coating the leaves with a fungicide to protect those leaves, The fungicide does not transmit to the tubers The effectiveness of modern fungicides is there to be seen when by accident the sprayer misses a small part of a field resulting in the loss of the leaves and then the crop as the blight fungi are washed into the soil and then the tubers by either rain or irrigation Today this disease has not lost any of its potency, it is only thanks to modern chemicals that we have been able to keep crops clean of Potato Blight.īlight is a fungus infection of the leaves of the potato. Of these critical crops it is the only one that can be 100% lost to one disease as the people of Ireland found in the famine of 1846-9. Potatoes are the third most important world food crop. We even had irrigators portrayed by implication as pesticide sprayers, please note BBC water is not a pesticide. However thankfully that does not mean we are out spraying the crop twice a week as repeatedly suggested last night. The reason the Potato crop is sprayed more than most is that it has one deadly enemy, Potato Blight. To give the country the reliable food supply we all expect we do have to use all the tools we are given. During their short 120 day growing period there are any number of things that can go wrong. Growing Potatoes is not a job for the faint hearted, particularly on our heavy Essex land. Not only is this erroneous it is also making use of subliminal messaging techniques not worthy of the BBC. The placard "Honest potatoes sprayed 32 times" was repeated in various forms multiple times throughout the programme. I was incensed by the misrepresentation of potato growers in last night’s program. I have grown potatoes all my working life, for over 60 years, as did my father and grandfather before me. I wish to complain about the Horizon Program “The Honest Supermarket” shown last night on BBC 2. BBC Complaints PO Box 1922 Darlington D元 0UR
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