Tips from the top three shared

TECHNICAL experts from Corteva, Bayer, and shared tips on how to get the best from key actives with a gathering of growers and agronomists at the recent AF Potatoes Technical Innovations Meeting.

The event at The AF Group’s base at Honingham Thorpe near Norwich was organised by the group which handles purchasing of fertilisers, fuel, animal feed, herbicides and a long list of crop protection products.

Scott Hughes from Corteva began his presentation with confirmation that the blight fungicide Zorvec (oxythiopiprolin) will be sold in future as a co-formulation with benthiovalicarb as an anti-resistance strategy designed to protect the new active ingredient. Bayer’s Jack Hill shared news about another tool for virus management in seed crops, with a different mode of action to Bayer’s established aphicide, Biscaya, and Dr John Keer, of Richard Austin Associates, who has many years’ experience of running blight trials, told delegates new strains of blight have disrupted the way growers and agronomists put their fungicide programmes together, not least following the failure of fluazinam to control the so-called ‘dark green’ blight strain, otherwise known as 37_A2.