News > Day One > How’s your knowledge of chemical compounds? Never mind going to your local ag chem supplier to buy Roundup, Thumper or Achieve brand-name products. With a marketplace about to get a whole lot busier with generic products, new combinations of old products -- and yes, even a few brand new formulations -- it will be more important for Canadian producers to know the chemical compounds they need in herbicides, rather than a brand name, Ken Sapsford says.

Ken Sapsford (l) talks to producer Brian Otto about product names of herbicides. -- Lee Hart photo

Sapsford, who's with the University of Saskatchewan's department of plant science and has specialized in herbicide and crop protection product research for the past 10 years, told producers at the 2010 Farm Tech conference in Edmonton this week that it's a new ball game when it comes to selecting herbicides.

"There are a whole pile of new product names out there, but not a bunch of new herbicides," he told producers during the opening day of the three-day conference and trade show, which attracts more than 1,200 producers from across Western Canada.

More choice isn't a bad thing, Sapsford says. The new range of products gives producers more options, and the competition from generic products helps to bring down crop production costs. But on the other hand, it does complicate the selection process.

Several things are happening to change the business of selecting crop protection products, Sapsford says:

1. Producers will start seeing new trade names and private labels;
2. They will see generic versions of well-established herbicides with new brand names;
3. They will see new trade names for new combinations of chemical compounds; and
4. Yes, there are a few brand-new chemistries -- new groups of herbicides -- coming to the market as well.

"Twenty years ago, for example, if you wanted a pre-seeding, burn-down product, you bought Roundup," he says.

But today, with the patent long expired on glyphosate, there are 18 different brand-name products on the market, all of them glyphosate-based and sold by various companies. If you include combinations with glyphosate, there are probably 25 different brand-name products.

Clodinafop is another example. It has traditionally been the active ingredient in Syngenta's Horizon herbicide. But now, on the private label side of things, Viterra is offering a product called Foothills. It's still clodinafop, manufactured by Syngenta, but Viterra is marketing it as well under the Foothills label.

Dow AgroSciences has the long-standing brand-name product Achieve, with the active ingredient tralkoxydim, but now it's also available from MANA as Bison, and from Viterra as Marengo.

There are also new combinations of existing herbicides with new brand names -- not new chemistry, but existing herbicides sold in different combinations.

A new combination product is Axial iPak, a combination of Axial and Infinity. Benchmark, another new brand, is a combination of florasulam and bromoxynil. Florasulam is also in Frontline and PrePass and bromoxynil is an active ingredient in Pardner and Buctril M.

"As we start to see this increase in trade names, but not new chemistry, it will be more important for producers to know the chemical names and herbicide group of the chemistry, to make sure they are getting what they need," Sapsford says.

-- Lee Hart is a field editor with Grainews in Calgary.