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Factors limit development of weed control products for specialty cropsHigher costs and liability risks are a few of the factors limiting the number of herbicides in development for specialty crops such as lettuce and strawberries. The issue is the topic of four articles in the April-June 2008 issue of Weed Technology, published by the Weed Science Society of America. While these specialty crops are labeled "minor," their total economic value isn't. "Minor crops are worth nearly half of the total value of all U.S. agriculture, yet weed management programs for minor crops are far less efficient," write the authors of "The Challenges of Specialty Crop Weed Control, Future Directions." The Interregional Project Number 4 (IR-4), created in 1963, was designed to facilitate the registration of pesticides for minor crops. But it and other similar projects have been stymied because of the prohibitive cost of developing new pesticides for specialty crops. "It has been a number of years since a new herbicide has been developed for a major crop that could be extended to specialty food crops," according to the article "The Role of IR-4 in the Herbicide Registration Process for Specialty Food Crops." Growers of specialty crops also often must rely on hand weeding, which is time-consuming and expensive. The effectiveness of automated weed control systems with crisphead lettuce is examined in one of the articles, "Multispectral Machine Vision Identification of Lettuce and Weed Seedlings for Automated Weed Control." Crisphead lettuce is primarily a product of California, where it ranked 10th in the state's farm commodities in 1999 with $767 million in farm gate value. It can be a challenge for automated weed control systems to differentiate between lettuce and weeds, but the researchers found that the classifier had an average accuracy of 90.3%; a rate they say likely would improve with more site-specific calibration. "Developing new products for specialty crops will be a key factor in finding solutions to meet the important needs of specialty crop growers," according to "The Role of IR-4 in the Herbicide Registration Process for Specialty Food Crops." Future IR-4 initiatives include collaborating with industry, growers, and academics to develop new herbicide technologies and extend these products to specialty crops; assisting with registration of products for use on crops resistant to existing herbicides; and finding new global markets for herbicides in specialty crops and reducing the cost of registration. In the article "Industry Views of Minor Crop Weed Control," author Roger E. Gast says herbicide producers need more incentives and fewer barriers to product development. "In most cases, development of new herbicides for minor crops is not economically viable," Gast writes. The four Weed Technology articles and their authors are: --"The Challenges of Specialty Crop Weed Control, Future Directions," by Steven A. Fennimore and Douglas J. Doohan. The full text article is available at www.allenpress.com/pdf/wete-22-02-364-372.pdf. --"Industry Views of Minor Crop Weed Control," by Roger E. Gast. To read the entire article, visit: www.allenpress.com/pdf/wete-22-02-385-388.pdf. --"Multispectral Machine Vision Identification of Lettuce and Weed Seedlings for Automated Weed Control," by David C. Slaughter, D. Ken Giles, Steven A. Fennimore, and Richard F. Smith. To read the entire article, visit: www.allenpress.com/pdf/wete-22-02-378-384.pdf. --"The Role of IR-4 in the Herbicide Registration Process for Specialty Food Crops," by Daniel L. Kunkel, Frederick P. Salzman, Marija Arsenovic, Jerry J. Baron, Michael P. Braverman, and Robert E. Holm. The full text article is available at www.allenpress.com/pdf/wete-22-02-373-377.pdf. 8/4/08 Date: 7/30/08 Advertisement
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