Only 30-40% of the usual supplies of the cereal herbicide, IPU, will be available in its last season of use before being withdrawn, Bayer CropScience’s Tim Holt said.

It meant the forthcoming season would see the biggest change to growers’ herbicide programmes as a result of the withdrawal. “Not every farmer has thought through the implications,” he suggested.

Against annual meadowgrass and broadleaved weeds growers would either have to use a pre-emergence or early post-emergence residual herbicide, such as a flufenacet product, prosulfocarb, and chlorotoluron.

Othello

That would need a change of mindset, he suggested, because they all needed to be applied much earlier than the traditional IPU timing.

For bigger meadowgrass the only option was Bayer’s Othello, he claimed. “It controls tillering meadowgrass and a range of broadleaved weeds.”

Containing mesosulfuron-methyl + iodosulfuron-methyl + diflufenican it was specially formulated in a new Odesi (oil dispersion) liquid formulation. “It adds on the broadleaved weed side – you get more out of the DFF than you might expect,” Gordon Anderson-Taylor of Bayer said.