WEEDControl How to achieve the best results By PAUL CAWOOD, Business Development Manager, LanGuard Ltd
I have spent my career working with pesticides. My interest was sparked at Nottingham Trent University where I specialised in, pesticide science. I have always been fascinated by the properties of these molecules we call pesticides. They have a capacity to work way beyond what we can achieve without them. After University, my working career began as a development agronomist at Europe’s leading independent field research organisation. I spent my days evaluating the field performance of products in development for both agricultural and amenity use. This gave me access to a wide range of situations in which these sophisticated tools are used. They are tools, as they do the jobs we no longer have time to do manually - and how much time they save! Has anyone ever wondered how long it would take to hand weed a twenty hectare golf course? I then moved to Bayer Environmental Science as a Regional sales manager. This was a tremendous job with a market leading company. I had a terrific time seeing products come to market through the R & D process and then had the satisfaction of promoting and selling them to a competitive market. Here I gained valuable specialist experience of sports turf and added this to my experience of how to improve the performance of herbicides and fungicides. I have recently embarked on a new
career. Last year I joined Languard as business development manager.
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Languard are one of the largest vegetation management and weed control companies in the UK. I have joined a team of experts that deliver a wide range of weed control solutions to everyone from Sportsturf Managers and Greenkeepers to construction companies for eradication of Japanese Knotweed. This is a fast moving business. Your clients expect you to deliver what you promise in the time you say. To achieve this, understanding how to get the best out of herbicides and fungicides as tools is essential.
I have been impressed with how
Pitchcare has grown. It is an active, constantly moving forum for professionals and volunteers to learn from one another.
One thing that has struck me whilst participating on the message board is the gap in knowledge there is about how to get the best out of herbicides. There are many reasons for this - mainly to do with training and experience. What I hope to do is to bridge the gap between what is learnt when you train to do your spraying certificates (PA 1, 2, 6) and the experience acquired from day to day use over years.
When a herbicide leaves the factory it is perfect. Each batch is quality tested before it can leave. So what leads to a disappointing result or a product failure? There are many factors that come into play after the seal is removed. The most important factors are discussed below - such as the weather, calibration, nozzle
choice and water volume rate. To summarise - a product only works as well as it is applied. The pie charts illustrate this.
The first chart illustrates the
percentage control you can expect if all the elements that need to be right are wrong. If it’s too wet or windy, your sprayer is under dosing, the main weed flush has not happened yet and it rains after you have sprayed - your results will be poor - at best only 50% of the control you expected.
In the Second chart all the conditions
are ideal. The variation from external and application factors are all limited by
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