BASF Hosts Conference Focusing On Innovation In California
December 31, 2013 BASF recently hosted 400-plus Californians — some growers, but mostly pest control advisors, commonly known as PCAs — to shed light on the company’s efforts at innovation.
BASF has such a big presence in the specialty crops arena, it’s easy to forget the company didn’t even enter the market until 2001. But they’ve certainly made up for it since, and will continue to ramp up their investment in R&D on specialty crops.
Neil Bentley, director of marketing, emphasized that while crop protection products account for just 6% of the $100 billion company, they account for 34% of their R&D. Much of the specialty crop investment is for products that will go on crops where the Golden State dominates, he emphasized, such as grapes and nuts. “We’re investing in California,” was Bentley’s closing message to the symposium. Here’s a look at some of the highlights of the Santa Barbara conference.
Big Picture
Outside of some University of California Cooperative Extension farm advisors, the only person outside the company who spoke was agricultural economist Vernon Crowder of Rabobank. Crowder lauded BASF’s R&D investment, because he said it’s the only way we’re going to feed the world’s burgeoning population on a planet where the amount of arable land is declining, and has been
since 1990.
It won’t be long before specialty crops are going to be directly competing for land with residential development, driving real estate prices sky high, he said. Any techniques to intensify yields will be explored, and a lot more crops will be grown in greenhouses. Two huge areas of R&D investment in the near future: food safety and aquifer location technology.
New Division
In addition to their “Big 3” areas of focus — fungicides, herbicides, and most recently, insecticides — they have a new group known as “Functional Crop Care,” said special projects lead Nick Fassler. It represents a new area of innovation that is developing products that will be of great interest to California. For instance, he said that 47% of nitrogen is lost due to leaching etc., and the state is struggling with groundwater pollution. BASF will have a product on the market in two to three years that will not leach out as readily and provide the same yields with only 50% of the water use, he said.
Insecticides
They have quite a few new insecticides in the pipeline, and plan on a total of seven hitting the market by 2020-2021. Next year they will introduce Nealta, a miticide for almonds, grapes, strawberries, and tomatoes, that is sorely needed because mites are notorious for developing resistance, and it is also easy on beneficial insects.
Nealta, as well as other new products in the pipeline, represent quite a commitment on the part of BASF, as Fassler said it takes 10 to 12 years to get a product from their lab in Germany to the field, at an average cost of $250 million per product. “You may know us as a fungicide company or an herbicide company,” he said, “but that is really changing.”
Fungicides
Pristine has proved extremely popular, but they have a new wave coming out that adds the Xemium molecule, which was specifically designed to control disease and
move throughout the plant. The “new wave fungicide” was introduced this year as Priaxor in potatoes and fruiting vegetables.
Any day now BASF expects registration of Priaxor’s counterpart, Merivon, for the 2014 season.
Merivon can be used on almonds, stone and pome fruit, as well as strawberries, carrots, and cucurbits. BASF had some pretty compelling demonstrations on how not only do these products control diseases, they actually boost the rates of photosynthesis, stimulating root growth, and increasing yields.
Herbicides
BASF is definitely in the right place at the right time because they have an older product, Poast, which has a new life. That’s because of the widespread appearance of glyphosate-resistant weeds. Not only that, they have a new take on an old product, Prowl H2O, a pre-emergent herbicide that binds to the first few inches of soil, where weeds’ roots are located. In addition, they introduced a product two years ago, Treevix, that controls two particularly bad weeds with so-called “Roundup resistance,” hairy fleabane and marestail.
Embracing Sustainability
Tom Laginess, who heads up BASF’s sustainability efforts, says that while others look at sustainability as something to endure, BASF embraces it. “It’s a growth driver for our business,” he said. “It’s a journey that never ends.”
Also, unlike others, BASF does not see sustainability as some amorphous, ill-defined concept. In 2011 the company launched their AgBalance effort, a holistic approach validated by the National Science Foundation that he emphasized is not greeenwashing.
It involves evaluating 69 indicators in 16 categories, producing one very definitive final score. BASF plans studies on individual crops that will allow growers to input various numbers to see how their sustainability efforts
are affected.
“For example, if I change my fertilizer rate, will I be more or less sustainable,” said Laginess, likening it to the Wal-Mart program.
Changing Strategies
Three out of four growers who participated in a recent survey by BASF suspect that glyphosate resistance is a cause of their difficulty to control weeds. As a result, 76% of these growers have already changed their weed management program to address resistance.
In addition, many growers have experienced lower yields, which they attribute to resistant weeds. These growers have also spent more time scouting and invested more money in their crops due to resistant weeds.
In the survey, growers identified how they plan to change their programs in 2014. More than two-thirds of growers indicated that they would be applying a pre-emergence herbicide this season and more than half are planning to add an additional herbicide to their existing program. Additionally, 50% of growers plan to use more than one site of action and 47% said they plan on using overlapping residual herbicides.
“These results show that growers are beginning to understand the need for a comprehensive weed management approach,” said Greg Armel, technical market manager, BASF. “They are realizing the importance of using residual herbicides and multiple, overlapping sites of action.”
The survey also highlighted the weeds that growers found the toughest to control in 2013. Nearly two-thirds of respondents said waterhemp was the most difficult to control, while 54% said that ragweed species were the toughest to control. Lambsquarter and marestail were also identified.
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