8:36am Friday 1st August 2008
By Chris Wickham
A Teddington allotment holder is at the forefront of a campaign to get a herbicide taken off the shelves after it ruined her crops this year.
Shirley Murray, who has an allotment at the Royal Paddocks in Hampton Wick, has been receiving help from Twickenham MP Vincent Cable as she battles to warn gardeners about the impact of manure contaminated by the herbicide aminopyralid.
The contamination has occurred all over Britain as a result of the herbicide getting into the animal food chain and gardeners spreading the resulting manure on their allotments, Ms Murray said her crops were probably affected by herbicide sprayed in 2006.
She fears the same could happen again next year.
Dr Cable wrote to agriculture minister Lord Rooker alerting him to the problem and suggesting the herbicide is withdrawn while the problem is sorted out.
It has now been taken out of circulation while manufacturers Dow AgroSciences work out what went wrong.
Ms Murray - who is one of a number of allotment holders up and down the country trying to raise awareness of the problem - called for aminopyralid to be permanently removed from the food chain.
“I have had some plants which have died without producing a crop,” she said.
“It started early in the season with potatoes and it got worse and worse.”
Ms Murray said she lost tomato, bean, pea and tomato crops while plants that did flower produced weirdly-shaped vegetables, although tests proved they were edible.
Having spoken to allotment holders who suffered these problems last year she knows it will affect her crops in 2009.
“This stuff doesn’t disappear until the last vestiges have completely broken down,” she said.
“That depends on soil conditions and you can’t speed it up.
“It is a particularly horrible thing to have gone into the food chain, I can’t see why they need a herbicide that is still killing plants two years after spraying.
“It’s very depressing and upsetting.”
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