An organization that helps small crops move forward is meeting in Lethbridge.
Large crops have access to things that smaller crops sometimes don’t have even though the crops are important to producers, consumers and the economy.
.
Such is the case with crop protection. The Prairie Pesticide Minor Use Consortium helps get that protection for them.
.
Some pesticides and fungicides that can be used on wheat and other large crops aren’t available for small crops like peas, lentils, forages, greenhouse crops and others. Companies that produce the pesticides and fungicides don’t always include small crops on their labels.
“We need to compete with the rest of the world,” said Blair Roth, chair of the Prairie Pesticide Minor Use Consortium. “They’re using these pesticides so this process allows us to then apply to PMRA to ensure we can have labeled uses for all of our small acre crops in Alberta.”
The PPMUC was formed in 2000 to facilitate the registration of pest management products for crops and commodities its members produce. The coalition is made up of commodity and industry groups.
Get daily National news
For example, Roth said some fungicides that are used on canola can now be used on smaller crops.
“For dry beans,” he said, “where sclerotinia is a concern, it’s also a concern on canola. We can roll some of those products into dry beans as a registered use through the minor use program.”
The Ag Chem industry is only about 60 years old. One of the big transitions in it is the trend toward generic products.
Ron Pidskalny, PPMUC’s minor use procurement officer said, “We have a flurry of active ingredients that were registered in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Those have since trailed off and we’ve seen a lot of the generics move in as the patents expired. We’ve also seen biotechnology take over and we’ve seen the transition of value capture on the herbicide move to the seed.”
Generics have a lower cost structure and have carved out a place for themselves. While they conduct research and development, Pidskalny says they don’t do as much as the major manufacturers do. He said it costs about $260 million to develop a new active ingredient.
“The large multinational research based corporations are capturing value in different ways. A lot of the ways they’re doing that now is by capturing value from the seed technology and feeding that back into R & D,” he said.
Pidskalny expects biological and specialized products to increase in the future. An example he suggested having bees in greenhouses place active ingredients on pests.
“You actually put the pest control product, which is a biological organism, onto the bee. The bee takes it into the greenhouse and moves it around and gets the pathogen onto the pest.”
Technology has improved over the years. Pidskalny expects many new biologicals and innovations will combine with traditional technology to give farmers more things to work with in the future. A challenge for producers he says is, “To become a lot more technologically astute and see where they’re going to be able to mesh the value of these biologicals with the traditional products in their operations.
Comments