Last year I interviewed one of our formulation chemists for an article about the effect that hard water has on agchems. This article generated a lot of interest and we received a lot of questions, mostly about hard water and its effect on glyphosate efficacy. There is still a lot of confusion around the effect hard water has on glyphosate and how the addition of ammonium sulphate works.
Archives for August 2015
Trifluralin – How it really works Part 2
In Part 1 of this series we explained how:
- trifluralin stops weed growth by inhibiting the division of cells at the root tip,
- trifluralin vapour moves very short distances through soil and so vapour movement won’t compensate for poor application,
- trifluralin is primarily absorbed into grasses through the roots rather than the coleoptile and so is far more potent when applied to the weed’s root zone,
- volatilisation can cause the loss of more than 60% of applied trifluralin and,
- studies have shown that trifluralin loses due to UV degradation have been low, generally less than 5% even under high UV conditions.
In this article we will review how soil type and soil pH affects the efficacy of trifluralin.