Paraquat – don't get mad, get even

Recently the APVMA proposed some major changes to the paraquat registration, and the farming community are rightfully very cranky about it.

I suggested in a previous article that there was a storm brewing over paraquat, looks like the forecast was right.

In case you missed it, the proposal can be summarised as follows;

1. The maximum paraquat rate for knockdown purposes will be about 800mL/ha – enough to give weeds a bit of a burn, but not enough to kill them. A bit like cooking a rare steak.
2. The maximum rate for crop topping will halve to about 400mL/ha.
3. No spot spraying through a camera sprayer.
4. No spraying paraquat on fencelines.

They’re suggesting that we take one of our most valuable herbicides and make it useless.

And it gets worse, it’s diquat as well.

1. No use of diquat pre-harvest.

This is a bit like halving the speed limit. Sure, it would save some lives and reduce injury, but does the means justify the ends? Traffic would be terrible, it would take forever to get anywhere, and your V8 cruiser with a three inch exhaust would hit the speed limit in 0.3 seconds.

Losing herbicides for political reasons sucks. Just ask a European farmer, they’ve lost hundreds.

The Ag industry will lobby hard to try and stop these new paraquat rules, and hopefully they will have a win. But from what we’ve just seen from the live sheep situation in WA, the left leaning government and public are a formidable opponent.

You should definitely get on board with opposing these new label changes.

And…..

Assuming that the APVMA get their way, here’s a few ideas about how we might continue to farm profitably without this important product.

1. Smash the ryegrass seedbank. One of the main weeds affected here is ryegrass due to its resistance to glyphosate, clethodim and other herbicides. This label change will make ryegrass hard to kill, so the focus on the seedbank will be more important than ever. You know the drill here, it’s all of the stuff we have talked about for years to use all of the tools in the box to control ryegrass. 
2. Amitrole in the mix. There’s a number of products in the market that include paraquat mixed with a very low rate of Amitrole. The Amitrole rate seems like it would be way too low to do anything, but it does help. It slows down photosynthesis which in turn slows down paraquat activity in the plant, enabling better translocation of the herbicide.
3. Spray in the dark or low light – I know that spraying anything at night is a bit naughty these days due to inversions and drift. I’m not necessarily advocating for spraying at night, but spraying in low light conditions such as morning, evening, or overcast conditions works for the same reasons listed above.
4. Use residual pre-ems on fencelines – we should be doing this regardless of these label changes. There are a couple of new products on the market such as Bayer’s new herbicide Alion, and Uragan from Adama. Fenceline spraying has always been done later in the season when all of the other jobs are done, but I think we need to move this job up to before seeding rather than after.
5. Use harvest weed seed control following crop topping at the new, low rate. A double knock of crop topping followed by harvest weed seed control (such as a Seed Terminator) is the A game. The new label changes with the lower crop topping rate will take the sting out of the crop topping operation a little, but this will still be a good option.
6. We need to explore other herbicides for the control of hard to kill weeds such as fleabane. This is one of the really big issues here. We were struggling with the knockdown of a number of hard to kill weeds, and for many of them, the double knockdown helped a lot. 

That’s just a few ideas, and I’m sure there’s going to be a lot more challenges than I have listed here.  

Let’s not give up hope. With any luck the APVMA will listen to all of the concerns and come back with a compromise.

But if they don’t, we can all put our heads together and work out a way forward.

The Terminator Agronomist

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