Efficacy and Crop Safety
We offer a wide range of sophisticated efficacy and crop safety tests on potted plants. The test plants can be grown in a greenhouse or outdoors. When testing agchem product’s that will be used in the field it is critical that plants are grown outdoors where environmental conditions both toughen them up and cause defects in their leaf tissue. Toughened plants grown in these conditions respond to agchem products in a similar fashion to field plants. By comparison plants grown in a greenhouse will typically be 5-10 times more sensitive to herbicides than those grown in the field. Our experiments are professionally designed with an understanding of what data is best able to support an application to a regulator such as the APVMA or ACVM. We have considerable experience in statistical analysis and, apart from the traditional analysis of variance (ANOVA) are proficient in factorial analysis (FAOV) and the particularly powerful dose response analysis (DRA). Our data has far lower coefficients of variance than field trials and so we can distinguish far smaller difference than field trials. Our data has been used to support hundreds of product registration applications and is particularly successful in adding weight to scientific arguments supporting product applications. Most companies understand that field trials come with big risks. There are risks that the weed/pest won’t turn up, that there is too much variability in data, it is hard to get large degrees of freedom in the data and this means that small or even medium differences in products are missed, unwanted pests or animals can invade and there is always the chance that the collaborating farmer will harvest the site by mistake. We can test products on a wide range of crops for crop safety and important weeds for bioefficacy of herbicides, some fungicides, plant growth regulators (PGRs), some insecticides and the effect of fertilisers and other organic or biostimulants on plant growth. You can use this data to support product registration, aid formulation selection, prepare promotional material and better understand field trial results. We have two laboratory track sprayers that allow the safe application of product to plants or soils. We have an extensive library of bioassay techniques on crops, weeds and diseases that have been devised by us and improved with repeated use over the years.