Canola growers will have access to a new herbicide for controlling cleavers in 2019.
BASF will be selling Facet L, a liquid formulation that can be used as both a pre-seed and an in-crop herbicide up to the six-leaf stage of development.
The company had been waiting for the CODEX Alimentarius Commission to establish a maximum residue limit (MRL) for quinclorac, the active ingredient in the herbicide.
That finally happened in July 2018 after years of languishing in the CODEX system.
BASF didn’t want to commercialize its product until the CODEX MRL was in place because China has no MRL for quinclorac on canola and defers to CODEX.
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That didn’t stop rival Great Northern Growers from launching its Clever granular herbicide in 2016 against the wishes of grain companies and the Canola Council of Canada.
Exporters were concerned they could lose the Chinese market if quinclorac was detected in shipments but that didn’t happen.
Sydney Marlow, BASF’s canola crop manager, said the CODEX approval came too late to launch the product in 2018, so the company conducted plot trials instead.
“We’ve had a ton of feedback,” she said.
“We see a big opportunity for this because there has been a gap in the growers’ canola weed control system.”
Nathan Janzen has had a cleaver problem in one of his fields near Rosthern, Sask.
“They really are a pain,” he said.
“They stick to everything and make swathing miserable and it’s an inseparable seed.”
Cleaver seeds are the same size as canola seeds, so they are difficult to separate and they are tough, which can be hard on cleaning equipment.
Janzen said exporters are fussier about the weed seed than crushers. They tend to downgrade deliveries containing cleaver seeds, while crushers treat it as dockage.
He has been successful in controlling the weed by switching from LibertyLink to Roundup Ready canola and hitting it hard with chemical.
“That seemed to knock the cleavers a little harder than Liberty herbicide,” he said.
He is happy to hear there is now an herbicide he can tank mix with Liberty so he can bring InVigor hybrids back into the rotation.
“It would be good to have that option,” he said.
Marlow said cleavers are prevalent in the black and dark brown soil zones and can present a real headache for growers come harvest time.
“It’s very long and viney and big. It’s sticky too, so it will get wrapped up in the reels. It can cause plugging,” she said.
Marlow is expecting good uptake of Facet L in areas where cleavers are a problem.
“Quinclorac is very narrow spectrum but what it does well, it does really well and that’s control cleavers,” she said.
Grain companies have removed quinclorac from the 2018-19 declaration forms now that CODEX has an MRL in place.
