Beyond Roundup: Say Hello to Enlist
Dow AgroScience announces new herbicide and new line of herbicide resistant crops
PJ Griekspoor
Published: Mar 2, 2011
A new weed control technology to move farmers past glyphosate resistance and into a new era as revolutionary as Roundup is on the horizon, Dow AgroScience announced Tuesday night.
Dow promised additional details about the technology behind its new product, Enlist, at a Friday press conference during the Commodity Classic, which opens Thursday in Tampa, Fla., and said they hope to have full registration of the new technology and be ready to market it by 2013.
The new weed control technology platform is based on a variant formulation of the herbicide 2-4D and will offer crops that are not only resistant to the herbicide, but stacked with the glyphosate resistant trait and insect resistance, Dow said.
Monte Hansen, a farmer from Benkelman, Neb. said the introduction of a new herbicide, complete with a corresponding line of resistant crops, is "as big, if not bigger," than the introduction of Roundup. He said weed resistance is a big concern in his operation.
Other growers see it as meeting a future need more than a current one.
"The big news I hear is that we will have a new mode of action that offers post-emergent weed control without crop injury," said Illinois farmer Paul Jeschke. "Right now, there are products out there that are alternatives to Roundup, but almost all of them have some crop injury. A new mode of action with no crop injury is a big, big development."
Jeschke said his region hasn't seen Roundup resistant weeds, but he has noticed that it takes increasing applications of the chemical to get the same results.
"We used to get total burndown with 8 ounces," he said. "Now it takes 12 or 16. That tells us we are moving the direction of resistance."
Dow officials said the new chemistry will be introduced first for corn, then soybeans and cotton.
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Tagged: herbicide, weed control, soybeans, cotton, glyphosate resistance
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