MEMBERS of the Wimmera's grain growing community want the public to better understand why farmers use the chemicals they do, ahead of a meeting on August 19.
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The Victorian Farmers Federation is staging a panel discussion with industry leaders and chemical specialists on the future of chemical use. The forum is at Horsham RSL from 6.30pm.
Ryan Milgate, a Minyip-based councillor on the VFF's Wimmera region grains group, will be one of the panellists. He said he felt consumer tension over chemicals, such as the widely-used herbicide glyphosate, had reached a critical point in recent months.
"I think a lot of people removed from (the process) don't understand farmers aren't going around blasting them across the countryside just for the hell of it," he said.
"I think we haven't really communicated that well what we do - generally we're one or two-person family affairs - that's come to a head now. We're seeing through social media every day another story about a court case against glyphosate in the US and people having their opinions on chemical use.
"We owe it to ourselves to let people know we do things based on science and facts."
A court ordered German pharmaceutical giant Bayer in May to pay AU$2.9 billion in damages to a US couple that claimed glyphosate caused them to develop cancer.
Federal government regulator the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Management Authority has previously found "the use of glyphosate in Australia does not pose a cancer risk to humans".
Mr Milgate said glyphosate was being used in the Wimmera.
"The meeting is to discuss the importance of chemical use to farmers and making sure everyone is using chemicals responsibly - adhering to the minimum times they need to wait between spraying a chemical and harvesting and using chemicals by the label, that sort of thing," he said.
Mr Milgate runs cropping and livestock operations at Minyip and Halls Gap.
Another panellist at the meeting, Grain Producers Australia chair Andrew Weidemann, said farming techniques regarding chemicals had evolved rapidly in recent years.
"People will remember dust storms around the Wimmera because soil wasn't planted on to contain moisture. Now we use herbicides to do that," he said.
"Consumers are asking more and more about where their food is coming from, and as an industry we have been looking at that for a number of years.
"We have really good control measures on our current equipment in terms of being able to use herbicides more effectively and better placed, and data around the amount and time of usage."
Mr Weidemann, of Rupanyup, said the expectation of understanding more about where food came from would come at a cost.
"The fear we have is if we use fewer chemicals, we reduce the amount of product we produce - which means there is less supply available, which then increases the cost of food," he said.
"We've already seen it with milk. It's started to be reflected that the cost of production is bearing out and production has dropped off considerably because of the downturn here. Eventually we may have to look at importing milk if we don't maintain a dairy industry that's going to be able to survive the current climate.
"Part of why we're having this conversation in Horsham is to talk about some of these issues and inform people more and more about where their food comes from and what they can expect from industry over time to address some of those concerns."