This week we bring you our 2019 Crop Protection magazine so it should be in your Irish Farmers Journal.

This magazine aims to update readers on the many changes that are taking place within the sector, from the development of resistance to the recent announcement of the loss of chlorothalonil.

While this is a serious time for growers in terms of the ongoing loss of plant protection products, up to this year there was little talk of new products and new modes of action to replace them.

This made for an extremely depressing outlook over the past few years, but this year we are hearing of considerably more new actives in the pipeline along with a number of new modes of action.

The magazine makes reference to previously defunct modes of action such as the strobilurins and notes that there are new actives from this family in the pipeline which have a slightly different mode of action because they are totally effective against all isolates of septoria.

We are also being told about new SDHI actives which appear to show good efficacy against evolving mutations which show reduced sensitivity to most current SDHI actives.

This gives scope for optimism. Hopefully, these new actives with different modes of action will be successful in protecting one another.

Strong pipeline

Since the magazine was written I had occasion, along with others, to visit a relatively unknown chemical company called FMC. I have known the name but not the company but they have long been a big player in insecticides.

Originally a machinery company, FMC initially stood for Food Machinery Corporation. It started out with spray pumps and a horse-drawn sprayer, went through a series of evolutionary changes and it is now an agricultural sciences company.

It divested its machinery interests along the way so the letters FMC now have no specific meaning.

The company entered the European market through its purchase of Cheminova. It returned to molecule discovery following its purchase of the DuPont crop protection business in 2017.

This had to be sold when DuPont and Dow formed Corteva. This acquisition gave FMC a full innovation and research line and it is an agchem and biological sciences company.

During the visit, Marc Hullebroeck, vice president and business director for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) for FMC, outlined a very impressive portfolio of potential new products that the company is developing.

Marc Hullebroeck, vice president and business director for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) for FMC.

Currently, it has 22 totally new active ingredients in development, most of which are new modes of action across all categories of pesticide.

Most of these are being assessed for the global cereals market but it seems that the new insecticides are mainly being targeted at fruit and vegetables.

One important active for the cereals market is a new selective grass weed herbicide.

The active called bixlozone is being targeted at pre- and post-emergence application on cereals, oilseed rape and maize. It is a new mode of action, can control blackgrass and is expected in the market in the next few years.

The company is also developing six new fungicide actives, five of which bring a new mode of action.

Marc said that all of these show good broad-spectrum disease control activity and that virtually all are active on septoria. However, it would seem that only three of the six actives are being developed for cereals.

Biological solutions

Being a plant science company, it is hardly surprising that FMC is also active in the biological solutions arena.

Operating under its plant health division, the company is looking at biological solutions, crop nutrition and seed treatments. It is also looking at digital tools to help the efficient used of its new products.

Dublin-born Duncan Aust is FMC’s R&D director for the EMEA region.

Duncan Aust is FMC’s R&D director for the EMEA region.

FMC’s biological arm came about following the purchase of a small company in the US which had a library of new biological agents.

These are now being evaluated for efficacy across the insecticide, fungicide and herbicide platforms.

Duncan commented that biological solutions are not quite there yet for field crops but he is confident that they will have an impact in time.

FMC already has one commercial bio-nematicide for field crops in the Brazilian market.

Duncan said that he sees biological solutions as being a supplement to traditional chemicals rather than replacing them.

They can play a useful role in resistance management because they seem to be multi-site in their activity.

He also said that biological solutions using foliar-applied interventions are unlikely to involve the application of live microorganisms.

FMC has been active in identifying natural strains of microorganisms which exhibit antagonism to target organisms.

Once active strains are identified through precise laboratory assessment, the next challenge is to identify the compounds responsible for producing the antagonism or control.

Once this is known, the compound then has to be produced from these microorganisms. If this is possible in practice, then the challenge is to up-size production capacity.

This is not a straightforward operation because fermentation using biological cultures are highly sensitive to a whole range of variables.

If the biological “soup” can be produced in industrial quantities, the next challenge is to get it into a formulation which can be used in commercial agriculture, either as a liquid, solid or seed dressing.

The innovation being exhibited by FMC offers hope and scope for the future.

While smaller deliver companies like this will not be discovered every year, there are many other small operations, particularly in Japan, which continue to innovate new solutions.

Such companies are likely to offer these actives to bigger companies to assess their potential in different markets and to commercialise them where appropriate.