Dr Gerhard H Verdoorn
CropLife South Africa
W
hich pesticide
should I use on my
crop? This is a question that plagues
crop farmers daily and while there
are consultants and agents that
offer advice it remains the prerogative of the producer to decide
which pesticide to apply. Given the
vast range of pesticides available to
producers the decision may not be
as simple as choosing a particular
active ingredient or brand but it
should be strongly guided by which
particular brand is registered for the
crop versus pest and also by market
forces. Our regulatory framework in
South Africa is very clear on pesticide use and basically demands that
pesticides may only be used for the
purposes and in the manners as
stated on the labels. That is relatively simply to accommodate but for
export producers to scenario is
more demanding: they need to
work with pesticides for which residues are allowed at the expert destinations and that is not on the labels!
So, question remains: which pesticide should I use on my crop and
the answer lies in precision farming
guided by precision data. Fortunately CropLife South Africa’s suite
of agricultural remedies information
resources comes to the aid of crop
farmers. It starts off with a set of
simple databases under the banner
Agricultural Remedies Database on
the website www.croplife.co.za.
Here one finds a general dataset for
pesticides and more focussed ones
for fungicides, insecticides, herbicides, adjuvants and plant growth
regulants, and lastly a precision dataset on pesticide toxicology. These
respective datasets will give a producer access to the registered pesticides available in South Africa. The
toxicology database can be checked
for the toxicity of a particular active
ingredient in terms of mammals,
birds, fish, bees and even dermal
and inhalation toxicity.
Another comprehensive set of data
lies in the CropLife South Africa
compendiums that are produced by
Kathy van Zyl. These are printed
guides including one on pest management in agriculture, one on
chemical management of weeds in
agriculture, one on the control of
problem plants, one on the plants
growth regulants and adjuvants
and one on the chemical control, of
plant diseases. Each compendium is
supplied by CropLife South Africa
with a CD ROM version of the compendium that can be viewed on a
computer. Compendiums can be
ordered from CropLife SA 011-8052000. The advantage of the compendiums is that they offer precision advice by indexed crop on each
and every pest, disease or weed
that may impact on the crop with
each and every registered pesticide
that is available to control it plus
dosage rates, specific application
advice, application restrictions,
withholding periods, waiting periods and even lists of the South African maximum residue limits. This
should bring the producer to a
point where a number of products
may be checked as potential candidates and if the farmer is conscious
about the environment he can reflect back on the toxicology database to gauge the toxicity of the
candidates. Yet, these compendiums are not the final decision catalyst but very useful nevertheless.
The crown of the agricultural remedy inf0rmation lies in the CropLife
SA AgriIntel Database. This is a
massive database with literally hundreds of thousands of data points
that can be interrogated by the
AgriIntel website on www.agriintel.com. It is at this stage still a
free tool for anyone which wishes
to make of it and only requires the
user to register after which ChanaLee, the manager, affords the registrant a password to be able to interrogate the database. AgriIntel
offers various search functions such
a searching for residue data, crop
plans or agricultural remedies. For
the export farmer AgriIntel is a non-