Friend of nature or foe of growing food - opinion is divided

Last year was a bad year for slugs, but should we like them or loathe them? Micahel Wale investigates

- Micahel Wale

Smallholders are playing a big part in agriculture’s battle to stop slugs damaging crops, and hopefully allotmenteers and gardeners will also feel the benefits. AHDB claims that slugs are costing farmers, large and small, £43m a year with the only proven conventional slug killers available being the environmentally damaging ferris phosphate, which also adds an increasingly higher cost to the price of producing the crop. Bofin (British On’ Farm Innovation Network) is a network is of farmers, scientists, and researchers united by a passion for innovation in farming. They came together to find sustainable ways of combatting the slug crisis. It is a £2.8m farmer led research programme set to change the way slugs are monitored and treated. It is funded by part of Defra’s Farming Innovation programme. As a result, this spring farmers were being called on to help train robots to spot slugs and the damage they do to crops. These are “Slug Sleuths” with special rigs designed to improve the machinelearning algorithms used to identify the slimy pest

Since the banning of Metaldehyde there is only one chemical control to rid farmland of slugs and that is ferric phosphate pellets, a chemical that is not welcome on environmentally friendly farms and smallholdings and banned by many allotment associations and councils.

WHAT DOES BOFFIN DO?