From Vol. 5, No. 12, April 2022 — and in need of updating
When I talked with hop breeders about low-trellis hops in 2011 they weren’t optimistic about brewers embracing them. Although it costs less to maintain them, the savings were not enough to offset lower yields.
Yet breeders continue to develop low-trellis options, because, as one told me, “You never know when we won’t be allowed to spray seven meters in the air.”
That’s not exactly what maximum residue levels (MRLs) for food products are about, but the impact for farmers is much the same. If what growers may use to protect plants is restricted then the cost of growing hops will rise.
Reinhold Kugel, head of product safety and quality assurance for BarthHaas, expressed growers’ concerns in a presentation to the World Trade Organization last month in Geneva.
“More and more countries are introducing MRL lists for their domestic markets,” Kugel said in arguing for globally harmonized regulations. “This is increasingly causing problems in world trade. For example, if a pesticide is authorized and used in the country of production but subsequently becomes subject to a new MRL or even a ban in the destination country, then within a short period of notice the affected product may be no longer legally marketable even though it is already in a bonded warehouse.”
In particular, companies that export to the European Union are increasingly being confronted with problems, he said. As part of the European Green Deal and its Farm to Fork strategy, the EU has been lowering MRLs, and has signaled it may lower still more. For the agricultural sector, including hop producers, this is becoming a problem, because there are fewer active ingredients available for plant protection.
Right now, says Leslie Roy of Roy Farms, one of the largest hop producers in the United States (and world), growers are looking at “a moving target as to what chemicals we will have available to produce a quality hop crop. What we know for sure is that we have fewer tools available to us.
“We, as well as other non-EU hop producing countries, will be challenged on producing hops for export. Costs will go up when growers have fewer options.”