To help growers with the new rules on agricultural waste introduced in May, Bayer CropScience have launched a new concentrated methiocarb slug pellet – Draza forte.
"Its 'bag-in-box' packaging can be disposed of as non-hazardous waste", says Bayer's Dr Bill Lankford. Referring to the Environment Agency (EA) guidance note 'Hazardous waste – you can handle it', he says the cardboard outer falls in the non-hazardous category, because it will not have contained pesticide, and the two 10kg polythene bags within can be treated as plastic pesticide containers to render them non-hazardous too.
"Growers will also have fewer packs to handle and dispose of, as concentrating the methiocarb formulation to 4% has enabled maximum individual dose to be reduced to 3.75kg/ha," he says. "This means 5.3 ha of treatment from one pack, compared with more than four 10kg sacks of Metarex or more than five 15kg sacks of metaldehyde mini-pellets to treat the same area at label rates."
Concentrating the pellet will also bring significant time savings for growers switching to Draza forte he claims. "Compared with a quality metaldehyde pellet, or mini pellets at half rate, growers will be able to fit twice as many hectares of treatment in a typical 20kg applicator hopper, halving the time taken to stop and fill up."
Tony Rimmer, a director of the farm waste collection service Farm XS welcomes this product development initiative. "It's refreshing to see manufacturers innovating with ways of minimising packaging waste and thinking about how it eventually has to be recycled. Draza forte's packaging splits neatly into two distinct waste streams."
The metaldehyde-type polythene-lined paper sacks he describes as 'difficult to deal with', as they have to be treated as plastic contaminated with paper. "Currently they are not categorised in the EA guidance notes, and it's difficult to see how they can be rendered non-hazardous on farm as triple-rinsing them is clearly impractical. Farm XS are working on ways of handling them, but for now we have to advise growers to store them separately."
Bayer's Dr Richard Meredith, who runs their national slug monitoring service Slugwatch, says that conditions so far this season have been highly favourable for slugs. "Growers should therefore benefit from switching to Draza forte, especially where there are a variety of slug species active. Methiocarb pellets control all species, including round-backed and keeled slugs, which are more problematic in potato crops. They are highly effective pellets, even under very wet conditions, and contain the longest lasting active ingredient."
"In the efficacy comparisons undertaken during the product's development, its performance advantages were convincingly demonstrated," he adds. "In a mild and humid environment Draza forte delivered 85% control by the seventh day after application, compared with 48% for Metarex and Delicia lentils – that's more than double the performance. Growers tackling slugs in high risk situations need to be using the best performing bait."
