A major change in the way turf fungicides are being positioned in the golf/turf market started with a happy accident at FarmLinks GC, the Alabama “living laboratory” facility where BASF and other companies test and showcase products.
“A few years back the FarmLinks superintendent was making an Insignia application on a fairway,” recalls Dr. Kyle Miller, one of the company’s senior technical gurus. “The spray tech got called away to do something else and didn’t finish the fairway. They didn’t irrigate that weekend and course dried out and got stressed. When they mowed the next week, the infrared cameras and sensors mounted on the Toro mowers they use down there showed that the side that had been treated was healthier, had much more chlorophyll production and performed better. It wasn’t totally a ‘eureka’ moment because we already knew about some benefits from our crop business, but that discovery pushed us to begin seriously researching the plant health benefits of pyraclostrobin”
That research eventually led BASF to seek new EPA labeling for its Honor and Insignia products to support findings that their strobi products do more than just control disease. The company believes the new labels are the first in the T&O market to reference plant health benefits in addition to pest management effects.
EPA approved the new labels and the products have been repositioned as the first in BASF’s “Intrinsic” line. In short, the products are the same but the labels now include language about increased root mass and length and stress resistance. In a nutshell, according to Miller, “When we treat turf prior to a stress event with Honor or Insignia the root volume and mass is greater than if we didn’t treat or used something else.”
The new labels were validated by several years of greenhouse research and golf course demo trials, says BASF’s marketing manager, Thavy Staal: “We were already testing at the University of Tennessee and went out to field test at a lot of golf courses. When we found out about the root system impact, we had our field guys pull root cores to see if it correlated to greenhouse trials. We saw it there. We had the greenhouse people use their scanning program, WinRhizo, where you clean and separate roots and scan them to reveal the true mass, root length, etc. The total length of all roots is a big indicator and we saw substantial increases.”
The company submitted the new proposed labels to EPA last year. Despite questions from some competitors, the agency approved them. “They (EPA) are very familiar with plant health labeling since we already had it for pyraclostrobin on the farming side which has similar labels for plant health impacts,” says Staal. “EPA stood by us since our data supported our claims.”
Despite the new label and branding, the focus remains on good old-fashioned efficacy says Miller. “The whole idea behind this is still disease control. That’s why you’re going to use the product. But with the added benefits that are now on the label, we provide improved stress tolerance during heat, drought, bentgrass decline and other extremes.”
One other major push with the new products is use prior to aerification. “We provide improved closure of the holes,” says Miller. “You just need to time your app prior to coring or tining.”
A few superintendents who were aware of the testing already put the new plant health program into action during the long hot summer of 2010. Staal cited Jeff Rottier at Janesville (Wisc.) CC as seeing a big improvement in a traditional trouble spot – his 15th hole – where members fully expected the usual summer decline. “He made his app in late July and watched it carefully. The untreated fairways declined but that area didn’t. He and his members were surprised and very pleased with the difference.”
The bottom line, according to Miller, is timing: “We don’t expect people to change their use of Insignia and Honor, but we feel like that with what we now know, there’s a timing difference. You want to use them prior to stress events – aerificiation, summer stress, any time you would need to cool greens. It’s a proactive approach.”
So, the sales pitch for the Intrinsic line? “There are a lot of good strobis in the marketplace,” says Staal, “but ours gives you quicker healing and stress tolerance. Why not go with that?”
Check out BASF’s YouTube video about the products:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mux9lIpfwA&feature=channel
For more about the research behind the Intrinsic brands, check out:
http://betterturf.basf.us/products/related-documents/insignia-sc-intrinsic-brand-fungicide.pdf
http://betterturf.basf.us/products/related-documents/honor-intrinsic-brand-fungicide-sell-sheet.pdf
