production very potent, they don’t require a lot of volume and they come in a dry granular form. That, he notes, is workable with herbicides that are effective at 75 or 100 grams per hectare. His only question is whether the convenience is still a benefit at 900 or 1,000 or 2,000 grams. Still, Cowbrough maintains the ability to customize crop production starts to become intriguing with this type of technology and he lays out a futuristic vision of a fully integrated system. “You have done your scouting, and maybe you’re putting that information into an app or a management tool, and that could be synched with your crop adviser at the retail outlet, that goes into PrecisionPac, and comes up with a recommendation,” says Cowbrough. “Then it also sends that data to your field records, then you have a one-stop shop in terms of recordkeeping and traceability potential. But this is all easy to say. It’s difficult to execute.” The main hurdle to overcome, he adds, may not be in accepting DuPont’s herbicide offerings or the use of technology. It might be in the human nature of the grower, and the motivation to change. As an example, Cowbrough has encountered some farmers who haven’t experienced herbicide resistance on their farms. He attended one grower meeting during the early part of 2014, where the incidence of Canada fleabane was shown on a map. “The farmers were in the county where the weed wasn’t confirmed yet, but they were more or less surrounded by the counties where it was confirmed,” says Cowbrough, adding that they acknowledged it was a problem. “Even when I spoke to a few of them after, there was an attitude that said, ‘I’ll wait until a certain active doesn’t work, and then I’ll use a tank mix.’”
More choices to come
“ It’s the convenience, the simplicity, the time-saving, the waste reduction.” — Dave Kloppenburg, DuPont Cowbrough adds that bulk seed provides a similar benefit, where it leaves retailers with less of a concern about the number of bags left in a warehouse at season’s end. The same is true with herbicides, both from a retailer and farmer perspective. “The last thing you want to be doing is dealing with a lot of half-jugs and quarter-jugs, from a pesticide perspective,” says Cowbrough. “To me, that’s the most obvious benefit, where one year, you decide that this is the weed management program for you, but based on its results, you might want to switch directions next year, but meanwhile, you’re left with half a container, and what are you going to do with that?” The short-term dismissal of PrecisionPac because of its use of only DuPont herbicides is overlooking what Cowbrough sees as a significant upside, and that’s the time — however long it may take — when every dry active ingredient becomes available for this technology. Why it also works well for DuPont, says Cowbrough, is that the company is dealing with many active ingredients that are April 2014
With the planting season, DuPont’s Dave Kloppenburg is focused on increasing the number of PrecisionPac machines in Eastern Canada, as well as increasing the number of actives. In Western Canada in 2013, the technology covered several million acres through 120 outlets. “We’ve had very good response from the customers who have been using it, and that’s the reason we’re moving ahead to expand, with more machines in Eastern Canada and also looking at corn,” says Kloppenburg, the company’s row crop segment manager. The company is on a definite growth trajectory in Eastern Canada, not only with the number of systems placed, but also in putting the pieces together for blends — with DuPont chemistries and third-party chemistries, as well. And Kloppenburg notes that how the blends are packaged is almost as important as what’s in the package. Acres and Cowbrough both mentioned the precise blending capabilities for different sized fields. Kloppenburg notes that the machine is capable of dispensing the dry ingredients in weights up to six kilograms. The situation with herbicide resistance, particularly what’s happening in the U.S., also demands greater flexibility, including keeping active ingredients that some might see as obsolete, viable and accessible. “We want to put together solutions that have a number of different actives, to be able to put blends together for a number of different situations, whether it be targeting the right weed spectrums, or having multiple actives for weed resistance management,” says Kloppenburg. “That’s the direction we’re going, and in corn, we’re just launching Engarde this year, so in 2015, we’ll be deploying our first corn PrecisionPac systems based on the chemistries we have in that crop.” CG country-guide.ca 49