Friend Bob and I were musing over the identity of a crop. We do this from time to time when we can’t identify what’s being grown. We show an interest in land use. It may not be our land but it’s our environment.
Bob asked the farmhand on the tractor. He was told it was a mulching crop. It was grown prior to the planting of Sugar Beet, spayed off to kill it and then the Sugar Beet was planted through it. This then apparently negated the need for the use of slug pellets! … WHAT?
I didn’t know slug pellets were used on an industrial scale… did you? I investigated and they sure are. I stopped using these things in the garden in the 1970’s when their threat to wildlife was highlighted.
It’s easy to subjectively attribute blame and say no bloody wonder the Hedgehog population has declined by 40% in the last 10 years and there has been a 70% decline on farmland of Song Thrushes between 1970 and 1995… but it does make you think … doesn’t it?
Problems do come from pumping chemicals into the environment; anyone that lived through the DDT era will know that. Even today I read that in the USA, in California the government are spraying Silver Iodide into the atmosphere to seed cloud formation and induce rain. Much needed rain within a drought stricken area; but at what cost?
The problem is when the environment is disrupted; when natures balance is affected, when things are done on an industrial scale for industrial sized human populations the solving of one problem quite often leads to another. We must try hard to work with nature and not against her.
Letter From Norfolk 
I don’t like slugs, but have never used slug pellets. The grass snakes,birds,hedgehogs and possibly our chickens eat them in our garden. Slug pellets on farmland are an extremely bad thing to do and should be stopped. To keep slugs off young vegetable crops (runner beans) I put a line of builders sand surrounding the plant area, when they start growing,they are then fine. There must be a plant that could edge fields or a sand type deterrent which would work and would be cheaper than slug pellets anyway.