New Dupont SDHI active penthiopyrad will be a contender in an increasingly crowded fungicide market this spring, ADAS senior research scientist Jonathan Blake told delegates at the AICC annual technical conference.

The company hope the new product will be available, subject to approval, before sprayers begin to roll in March and research carried out by ADAS over four years of trials have revealed robust performance when compared with competitors products.

Penthiopyrad is expected to be available as a straight or in a co-formulation with chlorothalonil, neither of which have been officially named.

“Although we didn’t include the active in the HGCA efficacy trials, we ran adjacent trials managed in exactly the same way, with the same application timings,” said Mr Blake.

In 2008-09 at Rosemaund, penthiopyrad performed equally, if not slightly stronger as a septoria eradicant when compared with other leading products, despite only being applied with a 0.5l/ha dose of epoxiconazole.

Mr Blake also noted that the yield responses from penthiopyrad, when partnered with epoxiconazole, showed similar increases over a straight Opus achieved by other leading SDHI formulations.

The 2012 trials put the product to the test under extreme pressure, with the untreated plots ending up with 60% septoria infection on leaf 2 and more than 40% infection on the flag leaf.

“When using the co-formulation with chlorothalonil at T1 and T2 at a rate of 2.0l/ha with 1.0l/ha of Ignite or 0.4l/ha of Proline, it also performed to comparable levels as the two leading SDHIs, Adexar and Aviator Xpro at 1.25l/ha,” explained Mr Blake.

“Anything that performs to a similar level of those two products must be taken seriously, and penthiopyrad also gives us activity on rusts and mildew, so it looks like it will stack up well,” concluded Mr Blake.

Active Ingredients:
Adexar   epoxiconazole + fluxopyraxad
Aviator Xpro  bixafen + prothioconazole
Ignite   epoxiconazole
Opus   epoxiconazole
Proline   prothioconazole

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