[Maysie]

Following on from my other thread about thistles, I have now uncovered another new world of red tape associated with the use of pesticides and the required training needed for the 'professional grade' spray stuff. 

Has anyone been on one of these courses and passed the assessments? 
Are they worth doing for the benefit of using professional grade treatments over amateur treatments? 
Are we automatically treated as professionals if we run our smallholding as a business?! 

I am all for training and learning how to do things properly, but fees in the order of £400-500 to learn/be allowed  to safely use a back-pack sprayer does seem a bit steep! 

From what I have seen so far, the professional grade chems seems to be about 1/5th of the cost of the amateur chems, so the costs may come back over time if treatments are required regularly. 

Any views?

[Fleecewife]

Sorry I don't know anything about 'use of chemicals' courses, but for your thistles you will need to use herbicides not pesticides.  Could well be the same course.

[Maysie]

As far as I can tell, pesticides and herbicides are all covered by the same pesticide regulations, so the same training applies. 

[Backinwellies]

Any pesticide (which includes herbicide) which you cannot buy in ordinary garden centre must be bought and used by person holding appropriate certificate of competency or supervised by such person.   So yes if you want to spray with chemicals from an ag. merchant you must do certificates or pay someone to spray for you .   Haven't seen other thread but  thistles other than creeping thistle better dealt with manually using thistle puller.

[Penninehillbilly]

I took the weedwipe course, but you have to do the basic storage and handling first, so it's 2 days.
Mainly common sense, but covers some things you don't think about.
If you can find a local contractor with a weedwipe, it may work out cheaper to use them, 15 acres is a lot of backpack work! (Guess how I know ). If the land is grazed down hard, the weedwiper only get the plants standing proud, so targeting herbicide use.
If not, by the sound of the number of your thistles the course is the only real way to go, but I dont envy you spot treating that lot. (If you do, i found running an electric fence wire dividing field into strips, saved confusion on what was treated).

Just seen Biw's post, I believe you can buy the stuff, but not allowed to use it without certicate,  bit strange, but that's what we were told.

[Backinwellies]

I took the weedwipe course, but you have to do the basic storage and handling first, so it's 2 days.
Mainly common sense, but covers some things you don't think about.
If you can find a local contractor with a weedwipe, it may work out cheaper to use them, 15 acres is a lot of backpack work! (Guess how I know ). If the land is grazed down hard, the weedwiper only get the plants standing proud, so targeting herbicide use.
If not, by the sound of the number of your thistles the course is the only real way to go, but I dont envy you spot treating that lot. (If you do, i found running an electric fence wire dividing field into strips, saved confusion on what was treated).

Just seen Biw's post, I believe you can buy the stuff, but not allowed to use it without certicate,  bit strange, but that's what we were told.

Seems to depend .,. Some at merchants now insisting on seeing cert at purchase.

[Maysie]

My thoughts were to get the fields sprayed by a contractor and then get the other areas (steep banks, edges of woodland and bits under the tree branches etc) done with my own fair hand using a back-pack spray. 

It all seems like it is more agro than it is worth though, so I am better off getting someone to do everything.