Farmers will have access to a wider mix of herbicides and surfactants this year, opening up the market for surfactant shopping.
“As of this spring, you will buy the herbicide and then buy the surfactant separately,” said Nufarm agronomist Myles Robinson.
“In the past, certain surfactants were tied specifically to certain herbicides,” Robinson said.
“The manufacturer would pack the surfactant in along with the active product. Poast would be a good example. If you bought Poast, you would get the Merge with it. The surfactant was tied to the herbicide label.”
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Robinson said that during the past eight years, manufacturers have loosened the strict herbicide-surfactant relationship. The result is that many labels now list other combinations a producer can use.
CropLife Canada, which represents pesticide manufacturers, took the initiative to loosen surfactant rules.
“It started out being farmer-driven. They are our customers, so if they have a problem, then we have a problem,” said CropLife executive director Peter McLeod.
“The variety of sprayers and varying water volumes across Canada, especially in the West, meant that some of the surfactant was being left over. The extra jugs started showing up in the collection sites. So CropLife got together with the federal Pest Management Regulatory Agency to work out a plan to separate the two products.”
PMRA regional manager Shannon Van Walleghem said that while surfactants are water-volume dependent, the active product is not.
“So if you use less water volume, you use less surfactant. Now you buy only as much surfactant as you need.”
This year, some companies have separated surfactants from their product lines while others have separated only those combinations where excess surfactant has gone into distribution. A small number of combinations are still packaged together when it is obvious there will be no leftovers.
“I think some manufacturers might say that if you want the warranty on the chemical, you must buy the surfactants on their label, but, a surfactant is a surfactant,” Robinson said.
“There are slight differences to make them more compatible with certain herbicides, but I think the differences are very slight.
“The main thing to remember is that if the chemical requires a non-ionic surfactant, then that’s what you must use.
There are very few herbicides which can accept an ionic surfactant.”
He said most surfactants today are non-ionic, meaning they do not carry an electrical charge and therefore are not repelled when the spray touches the leaves.
The addition of a non-ionic surfactant to a herbicide improves the wetting, sticking and penetrating characteristics of the product it is mixed with.
