Enhancement of bentazone efficacy with newly developed ecofriendly adjuvants

Adjuvants have been developed to enhance the activity of pesticide and possibly could allow reduction of pesticide rates. This is a very important fact as there are many concerns associated with pesticides use, because of their potential to cause adverse effects to operators, crops and environment. Because of that there is continued government regulatory pressure for safer pesticide products and for reduction of pesticides application rate. Trend towards minimum use of pesticides lead to development of new, more effective adjuvants to enhance biological activity of pesticide formulations, either built-in formulation or added in tank mix just before application. Among others, crop oil concentrates (COC) and soluble concentrates (SL) are bioenhancing adjuvants which enhance the effectiveness of pesticides. In our study we investigated how adjuvants with different compositions influenced bentazone efficacy. The first step was development of ecofriendly crop oil concentrates based on vegetable oils (sunflower oil, soybean oil and esterified rape seed oil) in combination with different surfactants. Then we compared the effects of the crop oil concentrates and the commercial adjuvant (Trend (R) 90, soluble concentrate) during the application with bentazone on two different locations. The results after two year trials confirmed that all investigated adjuvants have beneficial effects on bentazone efficacy, but the effects of the developed crop oil concentrate with esterified rape seed oil was the most pronounced.