20 per cent more efficient – new natural pesticide boosts profits and delivers higher kill rates
Bigger profits and better kill rates, that’s the promise of a new UK biopesticide which successfully completed field trials earlier this year – with 20 per cent more efficiency than its nearest rivals.
NemaTrident® CT is the first product to market for the UK’s Bionema, a spin out business from Swansea which is developing a new range of biopesticides products based on 20 years of scientific research. It goes on sale in March 2017 for vine weevil control in soft fruit and ornamentals and pine weevil in forestry.
Targeted at vine and pine weevil, the initial part of the trial programme was carried out in the forests of Wales, where the cold tolerant biocontrol agent, effective down to 8ºC, which uses naturally occurring insect parasitic nematodes (Heterorhabditis downesi) as its base, outperformed the market leader.
Later in the year it was tested against vine weevil in soil grown strawberry near farm in Herefordshire, where again it outperformed all of its major rivals – with a kill rate of 100 percent. This trial was ‘moderated’ by growers, agronomists, distributions and manufactures themselves, who took part in the final vine weevil trial assessment on the farm.
“The key to the success of NemaTrident® CT is the cocktail of ingredients we have used which, acting together, have radically altered performance,” said Bionema CEO Dr Minshad Ansari, speaking in AAB Conference: Advances in IPM 2016 in November this year.
