A recent EU meeting, held by the Standing Committee on Plants, Animals, Food and Feed (SCoPAFF), has voted for the non-inclusion of iprodione.
This means that all products across Europe containing this active ingredient, including Chipco Green and Interface from Bayer, will be withdrawn from the market.
Bayer is working to the following timescales for the UK and Ireland, in terms of sell-out and usage periods of iprodione product based registrations:
- 5 March 2018 - sales of Chipco Green and Interface will cease and the three month use-up period will commence
- 5 June 2018 -this is the last date for storage, disposal and use of any iprodione based products, including Chipco Green and Interface.
The loss of iprodione reduces the available number of fungicide groups for turf managers from six to five. With other chemicals also due for assessment, a further reduction in the total number of products on the market for turf disease control is to be expected.
In light of this, Bayer was pleased to launch a new turf fungicide, Exteris Stressgard, at BTME in January 2017.The new product brings a totally new fungicide group to the market - SDHIs, and without this innovation from Bayer, greenkeepers would only have access to four fungicide groups.
"Exteris Stressgard has unique benefits, making it an integral part of many turf disease management programmes for the future.It's important for turf managers to appreciate that the continued pressure on contact acting, chemistry will likely mean that they need to adopt a preventative disease control strategy, and Exteris Stressgard is ideal for this approach," says Steve Bishop, Bayer professional product manager.
Steve reminds greenkeepers that Chipco Green in particular has been a key management tool for the control of turf diseases for over 35 years.
"Greenkeepers should not be concerned with using the product up to its last use date. Numerous studies have been conducted on iprodione and we believe that our products, when used according to the label, are highly effective and do not pose any undue risk to the operator and environment."
