Spray Topping with Agrion Crop Solutions Adjuvants

Preventing seed set with a well timed spring herbicide application is an essential tool to reduce weed burdens – particularly for difficult to control in-crop weeds such as ryegrass, brome and barley grass.

To properly setup paddocks for a cropping phase, correct application timing and using the right herbicide with the right adjuvant is critical in getting complete weed set control.

Glyphosate and paraquat are the two main actives used for spray topping – the latter gives a good opportunity to rest glyphosate for resistance management and prevent the onset of resistance. They need to be applied at different timings, with glyphosate being more effective when used early and paraquat later.

The key advantage of using paraquat as a contact herbicide is that it can be applied later than glyphosate, when weeds have developed past the flowering or milky dough stage. Glyphosate requires time to translocate through the plant and therefore should be applied at seed head emergence prior to the dough stage (see Figure 1). This is useful for controlling barley grass which has a longer flowering period – but care should be taken when applying in flowering legume pastures. Seed set in legumes can be reduced significantly if spray topping takes place during early to mid-flowering.
Agrion Crop Solution’s adjuvants ENHANCE® and ANTIEVAP® make effective tank mix partners for glyphosate and paraquat, improving their activity by decreasing drift while increasing leaf coverage and herbicide uptake into the plant.

Mineral oils, such as ANTIEVAP®, are particularly effective at reducing evaporation in warm conditions (>25°C).

With the recent launch of newer and easier to handle paraquat formulations, such as Gramoxone 360 Pro® from Syngenta, a number of independent collaborative trials have been conducted to assess the performance of Agrion Crop Solutions’s range with these formulations.