Why it matters: Sencor’s portfolio products add more crop protection solutions for Canadian growers.

Sencor products have been used for decades on tough broadleaf and grassy weeds across a wide range of crops, including pulses, potatoes and soybeans. With the new integration of Sencor products, Sipcam Agro will expand proven herbicides, fungicides, insecticides and biostimulants.

Sencor products are a Group 5 mode of action, making them an important tool to help growers manage weed resistance.

Sipcam will soon begin managing all sales, marketing and distribution activities for Sencor 75 DF and Sencor 480 F in Canada.

Sipcam is headquartered in Durham, North Carolina. Since 2024, Sipcam Agro in Canada has focused on supplying crop protection products to Canadian farmers.

akienlen@fbcpublishing.com

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Elatus Era fungicide is a new offering from Syngenta Canada, which claims it delivers “superior protection” against anthracnose, white mould and Ascochyta blight. Both can signifiancly reduce yields and increase harvest time for lentil growers, the company said in a news release.

Syngenta is also promoting the fungicide as having a “first flower to row closure” application window.

Carolyn Wilson, technical lead for fungicides with Syngenta Canada, said Elatus Era outyielded competitor results in grower field trials by 3.7 bu/ac.

She also pointed out a clean, green canopy among its attributes. The company credits Solatenol — one of two active ingredients in the product — for this quality.

Solatenol is a Group 7 active with a track record for controlling anthracnose (including Group 11 resistant biotypes) and Ascochyta in lentils. It’s said to increase the light and energy capture needed for a productive crop, at the same time protecting the canopy from disease.

Elantus Era also contains prothioconazole, which is a Group 3 active Syngenta noted for its “strong, reliable” white mould protection.

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Out of the five federally-supported superclusters launched in early 2018, Protein Industries Canada has been most closely linked to ag research — but the new project, spearheaded by Vancouver-based Terramera, instead brings Canada’s Digital Technology Supercluster into the farming sector.

The recently-announced $6.9 million project, dubbed Precision Agriculture to Improve Crop Health, gets a Digital Technology Supercluster investment of $2.7 million, leveraging another $4.2 million in co-investment from other project partners.

The project calls for development of new pest and pathogen controls using computational biochemistry, genomics, machine learning and robotics. Participating private- and public-sector research partners include Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, BC Cancer Research, Canada’s Michael Smith Genome Sciences Centre, Compression.ai, Genome British Columbia, Sightline Innovation, Simon Fraser University, Trent University and the University of Saskatchewan.

The specific focus is on preventing crop loss from climate change-induced increases in pests, pathogens and viruses — and will start with wheat leaf rust.

The tech to be developed “will be used to quickly identify and test new pest management formulations and determine their ability to attack specific fungi on specific crops,” Terramera said in a release.

The platform to be developed will help design antifungal formulations and predict their effectiveness. Through machine learning, the analyses done on those formulations are expected to improve the next formulations, the project partners said.

Ag geneticist Steve Slater, Terramera’s vice-president of strategic initiatives, describes computational biochemistry as gathering the data that describe specific molecules, and bringing that data into computational models.

“We’re starting, with this program, to integrate all of that performance information with specific disease models, including the host and the pathogen that we’re working with, because we know that different diseases on different hosts are differentially responsive to fungicidal treatment,” he said in an interview.

With data in hand, “we can start integrating all of this into a big model that takes into account the genetic component of the host, the genetic component of the pathogen (and) the antifungal formulations we’re testing, and be able to then predict new ways that we can create more effective formulations.”

Terramera’s computing tools are core to the company’s work, he said — so much so that the company was one of the founding members of the Digital Technology Supercluster.

“Although there were these other (supercluster) proposals ongoing, for us it was a completely natural fit” to be part of the digital cluster, he said, specifically noting support from another co-funder, Genome B.C., which backs Terramera’s DNA and RNA sequencing work.

Another partner, Sightline Innovation, “will be providing a secure data exchange platform that enables data sharing across partners while ensuring data security throughout,” Sightline CEO Wallace Trenholm said in the partners’ release.

“We’ll also be working with the genomics team to identify chromosomal regions of both wheat and the fungal pathogen that contribute to disease progression.”

Efficacy

For its part, using a set of chemistries it calls Actigate, Terramera can take “natural” products and other fungicides “that work sort of on the margin of well enough,” and boost their efficacy to make them competitive with the synthetics on the market, Slater said.

By the same token, the Actigate system can also be used to cut the amount of synthetic fungicide needed for full efficacy against a disease outbreak, allowing for crop application rates “significantly lower than they are now.”

One of Terramera’s stated goals as a company, he said, is to reduce the synthetic pesticide load in agriculture globally by at least 80 per cent by 2030.

Actigate-based fungicides are also being developed against pathogens such as powdery mildew in crops such as cannabis, grapes and cucurbits. Terramera has also separately picked up funding from Sustainable Development Technology Canada to develop Actigate-based fungicides against other diseases in barley and oats, Slater said.

The Precision Agriculture to Improve Crop Health project’s initial focus on wheat, and wheat leaf rust, was seen as a way to “synergize” with other major research efforts already underway in Canada, he said.

How soon the team’s results can be put to work on wheat fields in a commercially viable product will depend not only on how long it takes to identify and test formulations in-house, but also on how long it takes to get regulatory approval — a process which, in Canada, can take three to five years, Slater said. — Glacier FarmMedia Network

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Some of this trend is attributable to single-mode-of-action products and a reliance on one or two chemistries or technologies — but the adaptability of weed, disease and insect species can’t be underestimated. Their respective abilities to select for resistance and evolve beyond an active ingredient or single mode of action is well-documented.

That’s why the move to multiple modes of action (MMOA) is gaining popularity. According to Glen Forster, technical development manager with BASF, growers are well aware of the impacts of herbicide resistance, particularly since they’re dealing with it at greater frequencies. That’s why many newer fungicides launched in the past four or five years are taking the multiple-mode-of-action approach, he said.

“With fungicides, there’s a lot of education going on in the marketplace to help producers become more aware, and that it’s important to think about resistance management before resistance occurs,” Forster said. “Growers are well-versed in herbicides but the knowledge base on resistance management in fungicides is becoming stronger on a yearly basis.”

One of the primary challenges in sharing that message comes from the frequency and intensity of herbicides versus fungicides. Growers must manage different weed species on an annual basis, whether it’s Canada fleabane or lamb’s quarters. But diseases are different: in any year, the right environmental conditions must be present, the host species must be at the right stage and there have to be sufficient amounts of the pathogen present — all at the same time.

“Even though you may spray the same mode of action on a wheat plant and then the next year, spray the same mode of action on a soybean crop, since the diseases may not be affecting that crop, you don’t have a selection pressure on an annual basis,” Forster said. “If the disease isn’t present in the field or the weather conditions aren’t conducive for that disease, you won’t have selection pressure.”

Advances in breeding technology have also helped growers, with resistance “packages” for diseases such as phytophthora root rot in soybeans and fusarium head blight in wheat. In some years, such breeding enhancements might negate the need for a fungicide application in wheat fields, or at least reduce their number.

But not every disease package is perfect, hence the industry’s move to MMOAs. No matter how sporadic a disease incidence might be, or whether its intensity is low, the key with MMOAs is to be proactive — to reduce the potential for the selection of resistance before it has a chance to start the selection process.

“The chance of having a population that’s resistant to both a strobilurin and a succinate dehydrogenase inhibitor (SDHI) in a field with a multiple mode of action is extremely rare,” Forster said.

“Although fungicides may not need to be MMOA today, it’s always a better strategy to use those prior to resistance selection, to prevent losing one of those tools you have. Diseases will adapt and we need to make sure that we constantly preserve the tools that we have from a fungicide performance perspective, and prevent disease from occurring.”

— Ralph Pearce is a field editor for Country Guide at St. Marys, Ont. Follow him at @arpee_AG on Twitter.

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UPL on July 20 announced it will pay $4.2 billion to buy 100 per cent of Arysta LifeScience — the maker of Everest and Inferno herbicides, among other products — from Florida-based chemical firm Platform Specialty Products Corp. (all figures US$).

UPL CEO Jai Shroff described the deal as “transformational” for the company, whose registrations in Canada include Weevilcide fumigant, Broadloom and Tricor herbicides, Perm-Up insecticide and Elixir fungicide.

UPL said it expects annual synergies of over $200 million from the combination, which it hopes to close in late fiscal 2018 or early 2019, pending regulatory approvals.

Mumbai-based UPL also said it expects the deal to accrue earnings per share (EPS) of 10-12 rupees (19-23 Canadian cents) in the 2020 fiscal year.

The companies said the deal will create what they described as a “New UPL” which “fulfills UPL’s objective of creating an integrated patent and post-patent agricultural solutions business with a global footprint.”

The new company, Platform said in its release, “will be in the position to provide growers with complete, competitive and differentiated solutions, thereby becoming a ‘one-stop-shop’ supplier to customers in key agricultural markets.”

Arysta president Diego Lopez Casanello described the two businesses as “greatly complementary,” and said the “scale and capabilities of the new company will generate significant value for growers, distributors and innovation partners.”

Arysta was formed in 2001 from the life sciences and ag chem assets of Tomen Corp. and Nichimen Corp., after which the ag chem business was rebranded under the name Arvesta. The combined assets went to Permira, an international private-equity firm, in 2008.

Platform bought Arysta from Permira in 2015 for $3.5 billion and merged its operations with two other ag chem firms it owned, Agriphar Group and Chemtura AgroSolutions.

Arysta’s brand portfolio in the Canadian market today also includes Rancona and Vitaflo seed treatments, Kasumin bactericide and fungicides such as Maestro and Elevate, among others.

UPL said its $4.2 billion play for Arysta will be financed by equity investments of $600 million each from Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA) and “alternative asset” firm TPG.

The investments will give a 22 per cent stake in UPL to a joint ADIA/TPG subsidiary. UPL said it has debt financing commitments in place for the balance of its bid. –– Glacier FarmMedia Network

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Fungicide applications are more likely to be profitable when the canola hits 30-40 bushels per acre, said Colleen Redlick, senior technical development specialist at BASF.

Justine Cornelsen, agronomy specialist with the Canola Council of Canada, put the recommendation for economical spraying at roughly 30-35 bushels.

A thin canopy also lowers the disease risk, as it allows more air movement than a thick canopy, she said.

Weather, of course, is another factor. Humid or wet weather at the early bloom stage creates ideal conditions to launch the disease, Cornelsen said. Heat also fosters disease, she added.

Moisture in the crop canopy — whether from rain or heavy dew — is all it takes to promote sclerotinia, Redlick said.

“If you walk into your canola crop around midday and your pants are still getting wet,” there’s enough moisture for sclerotia bodies in the soil to germinate spores, she said.

If farmers are in a dry pocket and have a thin crop stand — about 20-25 bushels per acre — it’s probably not a crop that warrants a fungicide application, said Redlick.

Cornelsen, based in western Manitoba, noted they are seeing some early-seeded canola with thinner stands.

Still, crops are looking nice in many areas, Redlick said. “We have that dense crop canopy, what’s looking like good yield potential.”

In the future, farmers may have more precise ways to measure disease risk. 20/20 Seed Labs is trialing spore-detecting equipment in farmers’ fields this summer, for sclerotinia and fusarium head blight.

Rotation’s role

Rotation doesn’t play as big a role in sclerotinia development as other diseases such as blackleg and clubroot. That’s because many other broadleaves, including crops such as sunflowers and soybeans, host the disease, Cornelsen said.

Sclerotinia is not like fusarium, where specific strains infect different plants, she said. “Sclerotinia is a generalist.”

Unfortunately, sclerotia bodies can also survive in the soil for several years, she said. This means it’s usually safe to assume that sclerotinia inoculum is present.

Tight rotations don’t help the situation either, she said; canola-on-canola can increase risk, as inoculum builds.

Redlick suggested farmers consider the disease state the last time they grew canola, as it can affect disease pressure in the current crop.

“A lot of canola is being seeded on that 2016 stubble. And 2016 was a very intense year for sclerotinia pressure,” she said.

Managing the disease

Redlick suggested farmers establish an even crop stand of five to seven plants per square foot. Excessive seeding rates can lead to more lodging, she said.

Farmers should also protect the crop from early-season insects and diseases, she said. For example, flea beetles can cause more stand variability, which affects fungicide staging.

Blackleg can also cause lodging, so farmers should use a resistant variety or use fungicide if the disease is an issue.

Farmers can choose varieties with sclerotinia tolerance, Cornelsen said, but in high-risk years, they should still spray.

Fungicides are generally registered for the 20 per cent to 50 per cent bloom stage. Cornelsen and Redlick both suggested aiming for earlier than 50 per cent.

Sclerotinia infects the plant through the petals, which catch between the stems and branches when they fall, causing the infection. At 20 per cent bloom, none of the petals have dropped yet, and the fungicide is coating the petals, Cornelsen said.

“Once you move to 50 per cent, you’re already starting to see some (petals) fall down. So you might have an early infection.”

At 20 per cent bloom, farmers will see about 15 open flowers on the main stem. Cornelsen said this usually happens four to six days after flowering begins, but the recommendation is to pull plants and count flowers.

By the time the crop as a whole looks really yellow, it’s likely at 50 per cent bloom, Redlick said. At that point farmers will see more than 20 open flowers on the main stem, plus flowers starting to open on the side.

There are times when an early application won’t be enough. In 2016, canola crops had a very long flowering period, Cornelsen said, and that led to early and late infections, and two applications often proved to be more effective that year.

There are also conditions when farmers can skip the fungicide. In 2017, Cornelsen saw early symptoms of sclerotinia in areas, but dry weather kept the disease from turning into a yield-buster.

But even with dry weather, one rain can raise the risk, she added.

“It’s very environmentally-dependant,” Cornelsen said. “I think that’s what makes it so frustrating to deal with.”

— Lisa Guenther is a field editor for Grainews and Country Guide at Livelong, Sask. Follow her at @LtoG on Twitter.

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Tests carried out by a team from the University of Illinois showed bees preferred to collect sugar syrup laced with the fungicide chlorothalonil over sugar syrup alone.

The finding follows other studies linking fungicides to a worldwide plunge in honeybee and wild bee populations which are crucial for pollinating crops.

“Bees are kind of like humans in that they sometimes like things that aren’t necessarily good for them,” said University of Illinois entomology professor May Berenbaum, who led the research.

She said fungicides were bad news for bees because they could exacerbate the toxicity of pesticides and kill off beneficial fungi in hives.

Her team set up two feeding stations in an enclosure allowing the bees to choose sugar syrup laced with a test chemical or without. The chemicals included three fungicides and two herbicides at various concentrations.

The researchers were taken aback to find the bees choosing one of the fungicides.

Chlorothalonil, sold under various brand names including Syngenta’s Bravo, is registered in Canada for disease control in various pulse, fruit and vegetable crops and in wheat.

“It was a surprise when they actually liked them,” Berenbaum told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone, adding that it could explain why fungicide contamination in hives was so common.

“This is not anything that anyone had even thought about before so we need to readjust our focus because there certainly could be implications for agriculture…”

However, she said the bees actively avoided a second tested fungicide and were neutral about a third.

The scientists said the findings were “worrisome” in light of research showing fungicides interfere with honey bees’ ability to metabolize pesticides used by beekeepers to kill parasitic mites that infest their hives.

The scientists were also surprised to find the bees showed a taste for the widely used herbicide glyphosate.

A study by the Center for Biological Diversity last year said hundreds of native bee species in North America and Hawaii were sliding towards extinction.

It said bees provided more than US$3 billion in fruit-pollination services each year in the U.S.

Experts have blamed habitat loss, heavy pesticide use, climate change and increasing urbanization for declining numbers.

The United Nations recently announced an annual World Bee Day on May 20 to raise awareness of their importance and declining numbers.

— Reporting by Emma Batha for the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, which covers humanitarian news, women’s rights, trafficking, corruption and climate change. Includes files from AGCanada.com Network staff.

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“Insecticides work; they kill insects. Fungicides have been largely overlooked because they are not targeted for insects, but fungicides may not be quite as benign — toward bumblebees — as we once thought,” Scott McArt, assistant professor of entomology at New York’s Cornell University, said in a release Wednesday. “This surprised us.”

McArt is the lead author on the study, published Wednesday in the Proceedings of the Royal Society.

“While threats to bees are numerous, few analyses have attempted to understand the relative importance of multiple stressors,” the study team wrote. “Such analyses are critical for prioritizing conservation strategies.”

This analysis, McArt said, shows how fungicides — particularly chlorothalonil, a general-use fungicide often found in bumblebee and honeybee hives — may negatively affect bee health.

The study team gauged 24 habitat, land-use and pesticide-use variables across 284 sampling locations, looking at which variables predicted pathogen prevalence and range contractions, by way of machine learning model selection techniques.

“We found that greater usage of the fungicide chlorothalonil was the best predictor of pathogen prevalence in four declining species of bumblebees,” particularly nosema (Nosema bombi), a gut infection that can be fatal in bumblebees and honeybees.

Chlorothalonil, in Canada, is an active ingredient in crop fungicides such as Syngenta’s Bravo, among others. Bravo, for one, is registered to manage diseases such as early blight and late blight in potatoes and ascochyta blight in peas, chickpeas and lentils.

Chlorothalonil has been linked to stunted colony growth in bumblebees and an increased vulnerability to nosema, the study team said.

Bees, McArt said, can pick up the fungicides’ residue when foraging for pollen and nectar.

“While most fungicides are relatively nontoxic to bees, many are known to interact synergistically with insecticides, greatly increasing their toxicity to the bees,” he said.

“Since fungicide exposure can increase susceptibility of bees to nosema, this may be the reason we’re seeing links between fungicide exposure, nosema prevalence and bumblebee declines across the U.S. in this data set,” McArt said.

Nosema, the team wrote, has previously been found in greater prevalence in some declining U.S. bumblebee species compared to “stable” species.

“Greater usage of total fungicides was the strongest predictor of range contractions in declining species, with bumblebees in the northern (U.S.) experiencing greater likelihood of loss from previously occupied areas.”

The team said its results “extend several recent laboratory and semi-field studies that have found surprising links between fungicide exposure and bee health.”

Specifically, they wrote, “our data suggest landscape-scale connections between fungicide usage, pathogen prevalence and declines of threatened and endangered bumblebees.”

The team noted its study builds on a large data set collected by Sydney Cameron, professor of entomology at the University of Illinois. — AGCanada.com Network

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Fungicide spraying has occurred to control diseases such as fusarium head blight and leaf diseases, but farmers are running into some problems with applications, according to Bruce Burnett, crop specialist with CWB in Winnipeg.

“In Manitoba especially, some of the rainfall here has been fairly persistent. Farmers have had to either spray multiple times, or have had difficulty getting the spray on right at the correct time,” he said.

The story is a bit better in eastern Saskatchewan and western Manitoba, where the crop is in reasonable shape. Conditions aren’t looking so great further west due to persistent dryness this spring and early summer.

“It’ll be lowering yields out in the western areas,” Burnett said. “We’re especially concerned about the heat that we’re expected to get over the next week or so because most of the winter cereal crops should be flowering or in that general stage at that point in time.”

When crops are flowering, cooler temperatures are more favourable, as hot and dry conditions could harm the crop’s progress.

Yields may not be the best, and harvested area will likely be down from earlier expectations due to unfavourable weather, according to Burnett.

But Western Canada’s winter wheat crops have been developing at a faster than normal pace this year, mainly due to a warmer than average spring.

“The harvest should be a little earlier than normal. Basically the winter wheat crops are mostly headed now, so you’d be looking at a harvest around the end of July for most of the crops in the southern growing areas,” Burnett added.

The winter wheat harvest normally begins within the first two weeks of August, thus on track to start about a week early this year.

— Terryn Shiells writes for Commodity News Service Canada, a Winnipeg company specializing in grain and commodity market reporting.

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