This will be a challenging year for crop producers. Profitability is challenged by the poor prospects for grain price, high production costs, falling entitlement values, high land rental costs and the loss of a number of chemical tools. Add to these the risk of resistance development in septoria to the SDHI fungicide family and there is plenty reason for concern.

These concerns are perhaps best demonstrated by the number of thinking growers who are considering not planting parts of their land which are less likely to produce high yields. This is the first time that this option is being seriously considered that I can recall. Price remains largely outside of our control, but our willingness in the past to embrace additional costs is now having a real impact on confidence in the sector.

Our total dependence on chemicals to provide control of many problems is now impacting on another front – resistance. It is becoming an increasing problem across all inputs, from fungicides to herbicides to insecticides. This has been staring us in the face for many years, but now the issues have become real. It is for this reason that much of this magazine is focused on the current state of knowledge on these topics.

This is not a time for reckless use of these tools – indeed our main objective must be to embrace integrated pest management (IPM) as much as possible to minimise the selection pressure being exerted on our inputs. One of the best helping hands that we can give the SDHIs on wheat is to plant varieties with good genetic resistance. And the same goes for all crops and diseases.

But other things have an impact here also. Very early drilling increases the pressure from septoria and it also heavily favours most grassweeds. We now have blackgrass and canary grass as expanding real problems and we must use rotation and cultural control methods to help eliminate these weeds. We must begin to think in terms of getting rid of problems rather than being trapped in annual control and its long-term cost.

The most immediate threat is SDHI resistance is septoria. It is essential that Teagasc provides the lead for us in terms of monitoring and research-guided advice. We need independence in this regard, as it provides less space for confusion. But we also need this advice translated into responsible field use because it only takes a small bit of product abuse to give resistance the upper hand, if those isolates can become dominant.

This year sees the loss of chlorpyrifos (Dursban), leaving yet another gap in our crop protection armoury. We are also seeing grave concerns for the future of glyphosate reregistration. These moves by EU politicians will fundamentally alter how crop production can be conducted in the years ahead and we must learn to react now.

There have been many other changes to your chemical armoury with products being lost for a range of reasons while others have been reregistered. Where a product has been reregistered, pay attention to the new label as it many contain use changes. The “use by” column indicates the date by which the product should be used or the date by which its previous PCS number should be used.

In this magazine, we have attempted to provide a list of products with relevant details. This has been done with the help of the main distributors, but also with considerable help from Department of Agriculture staff, who have again checked the details. But one should still check the label in case any item of this vast amount of data remains incorrect. I also note an increasing number of variants of the same active and have had to exclude most of the many chlorothalonil options and some of the straight epoxiconazole products due to space constraints.

To read the full Crop Protection Focus Supplement, click here.