Canada is a country of 40 million, and while we’re also an exporting nation, many crop types grown here are at such a small scale that the economics just don’t work to have a company go through the steps required to register a pesticide for use.
That’s where the Minor Use program through the Pest Management Centre comes in. But even with a minor use registration protocol, it can take five years and hours upon hours of work to get sufficient data to register a product.
One way to speed up the process and save valuable people power is to use a rep crop. A rep crop is a crop that can be used as proxy to a group of crops, where any residue testing work done on the one crop is applicable to all the other crops it represents.
In Saskatchewan, Erin Adams, with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, is working with dill as a representative crop for coriander, fenugreek, cumin, and caraway.
She explains that by collecting pesticide residue data on dill and all its factions, that data can be used to register a pesticide on all the other crops, adding a level of efficiency that would be impossible without a rep crop.
Adams says that the work being done at the Western Applied Research Corporation at Scott, Sask., is in response to blossom blight of coriander and caraway. The efficacy data is done on the actual crop, she says, but the residue data will carry over from dill.
Check out the work Adams and her colleagues are doing in this video interview.
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