Dow chemicals launch new herbicide for Irish market

DOW Chemicals have launched the first new herbicide for a long time on the Irish market. The new product is to be known as Pixxaro and it is a welcome addition to the armoury of agrochemicals available to tillage farmers. Pixxaro contains a new active called Arylex in a mix with fluroxypyr. The biggest benefit will be control of suresistant chickweed and poppy. It will also control fumitory, which has become quite hard to kill in some cases. It is a robust product and will work in tough conditions.

However, Pixxaro will always need a partner as it does not control some common weeds, notably charlock, groundsel, corn marigold, speedwell etc.

We are losing chemical control products every year and they are very hard to replace. We had more than 1000 active ingredients available for use but this has dwindle to about 400 today. The cost of developing new products is huge and also the cost of maintaining a product on the market has sky-rocketed over the past 20 years. The result is that many old reliable products are disappearing , such as IPU, Linuron. The replacement product is typically more expensive and not as good.

My feeling is that one of the main reasons for vital products disappearing is that when a product becomes generic (ie, when the patent lapses) competition increases and profitability drops. The cost of maintaining the product on the market is not worth the risk so it disappears. This is worst where the product has a narrow market segment of limited acreage. It can be easier to forget about the product than to persevere with the cost of keeping it on the market.

We in Breen Agricultural Services will continue to support our customers with up to date information in the ever-changing world of today. We also have invested in a new system of record – keeping for our customers which will ease the job of producing records for IGAS, Dept. of Agriculture inspections, etc.. Call us for more information.