CropLife 100: What’s Driving Increased Demand for Adjuvants?

As product segments go for CropLife 100 ag retailers, adjuvants have continued to do very well year-over-year. In fact, during most years, the adjuvants segment has regularly grown between 1% and more than 5% for the majority of the nation’s top ag retailers. This trend continued according to data from the 2019 CropLife 100 survey, where 55% of respondents reported their adjuvants sales year-over-year moving forward in this percentage range.

Regarding why this segment has continued to grow despite some pretty challenging financial agricultural years, Johnnie Roberts, Director of Formulation Development and Technical Support with Helena Agri-Enterprises, believes it has to do with how the application marketplace has embraced these products in recent years. “In the mid-1970s, there were only three pesticide labels (atrazine, paraquat, and MSMA) that recommended adjuvants,” Roberts told CropLife magazine in a recent interview. “Today there are more than 1,000.”

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More recently, the introduction of dicamba and 2,4-D cropping systems to combat herbicide-resistant weeds – which began in earnest during the 2017 growing season – has made the demand for adjuvants grow even faster.  “It seems like we jumped into tank-mixing with dicamba pretty quickly, and many of those tank-mix partners are oil soluble and need help from an oil-based adjuvant,” said Jim Reiss, Precision Laboratories, in a recent CropLife interview. “We’re looking at ways to build additional functionality into those formulations – instead of just being a premix water-conditioning agent and DRA, in the future it may have other attributes, too.”

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Years ago, adjuvants were commonly perceived as “snake-oil” products, and their manufacturers’ reputations suffered as a result. However, with the rise of dicamba-resistant technologies, their credibility has now elevated, Reiss observed. “Now people realize that if nothing else, it’s a great testimonial as to what actually works and what doesn’t work,” he said. “It points to the science behind matching crop protection formulations with certain adjuvants and nozzles to optimize the entire spray process.”

Based upon these newer products continuing to expand their reach within the agricultural marketplace, it’s safe to assume that the adjuvants segment will remain a steady growth one for the nation’s top ag retailers, in 2020 and beyond.

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