Arable Product Update: 2024 highlights and 2025 preview

Corteva Agriscience has brought a vast array of new innovations to market since its launch as a global pure-play agricultural company in 2019. Over the past five years we have delivered new innovations for British and Irish farmers – including fungicides, oilseed rape herbicides, cereal herbicides, clover safe grassland herbicides, maize herbicides, a number of impressive seed varieties and Biological products. 

Biologicals

Corteva Biologicals partners with farmers to understand their unique challenges and deliver highly effective solutions that complement and build on their current farming practices. Our biological solutions such as BlueN^™ and Kinsidro^® Grow+ are drawn from nature and help farms remain productive and profitable. This year, we introduced a new biological product, Lattice^®, for use on row crops, the bacteria found in Lattice will promote root growth, improving nutrient uptake, particularly phosphorus.

Herbicides

Cereals

Wheat growers in the UK will have a new herbicide at their disposal next spring to tackle a wide range of grass and broad-leaved weeds. Announcing registration on the 19^th of December 2024, Broadway® Ultra builds on the success of Broadway® Star which has been a mainstay of early-season weed control for 14 years.

Corteva has now combined pyroxsulam and mesosulfuron-methyl in the new Broadway Ultra formulation, offering arable farmers the ability to control an extensive spectrum of weeds in a single pass. Read the press release here.

In other good news, for 2025 Pixxaro® will be available in Corteva’s new and improved 5L bottle format and will also feature an easyconnect cap. Full details here.

Oilseed rape

Corteva’s range of robust autumn herbicides, including Belkar®, Astrokerb® and Kerb® Flo 500, have fitted well into grower programmes this year. Applications for Belkar are open until the end of December and for Astrokerb and Kerb Flo 500, end of January. For problem broad-leaved weeds in spring 2025, Korvetto® is the best option.

Sugar beet

Sugar beet growers now have access to a range of Corteva solutions to help them maximise their yield i.e. Shield Pro™, Instinct®, Kinsidro® Grow +, Lattice® and BlueN™. Our leaflet explains more.

Amenity/Speciality

For those interested in the amenity sector, Arylex™ active has entered the UK amenity market with two new products for 2024-2025. Grandstand®, introduced in this year, controls a wide range of problem weeds in managed amenity turf. Trophy XL®, set to launch in 2025, will tackle persistent weeds such as plantain.

Grassland

For more information about our grassland herbicides, sign up to our Forage Agronomy Update or speak to your local Corteva area manager.

Fungicides

Potatoes

2024 was one of the most intense blight epidemics seen in the last 30 years and Zorvec™ and Option® delivered in demand and performance. New guideline recommendations around resistance management were well adopted by growers. 2025 will see us continue our stewardship efforts to sustain Zorvec as an integral backbone to blight programmes.

Cereals

Inatreq™ products continue to perform extremely well and offer excellent disease control and yields with free resistance management for other sites of action (principally SDHI and Triazole). SDHI and triazoles make up approximately 70% of all fungicide applications and this high use coupled to recent (stronger) introductions means that the selection pressure for greater resistance has just stepped up a notch. The use of folpet can mitigate this to some extent but by far the better mitigation, at least for one application to a wheat crop, is to use a product based on Inatreq which has no known resistance and efficacy far superior to folpet.

To choose Inatreq™ solutions is in no way a compromise and shows intelligent product selection – meeting the needs of today with an eye to protecting the future. Univoq™ is the leading Inatreq™ product in the market and given the high performance it offers, it is extremely competitively priced.

Pioneer winter oilseed rape and maize hybrids

Pioneer® Protector® Sclerotinia hybrids PT303 and PT312 were both very popular choices this year for OSR growers. Built-in protection against this damaging, unpredictable disease provides growers with an extra level of yield protection. PT315 offers both TuYV and pod shatter resistance, making the Pioneer range wider than ever.

For maize growers, the Pioneer range has provided a wide array of high-performing options. P7326 was the biggest-selling maize hybrid in the UK in 2024 (Source: Kynetec), once again. P7034, termed an M3 hybrid, continues to gain new users with its high rumen degradable starch. P7179 has provided very high starch yields for such an early hybrid, and the two new Pioneer hybrids for 2024, P7381 and P7647, appear to have delivered all the yield increases measured in PACTS trials.

Seed treatments

Corteva’s novel, new growth nutrition seed treatment, Ympact® was a talking point at Cereals Event this year. Ympact enhances seedling growth and optimises metabolic energy and stress tolerance. It supports crops in the early stage of growth giving even crop establishment and an increase in early vigour. It increases root system development and improves the conditions for plant resistance to abiotic stress factors.

Insecticides

Corteva insecticides provided wide support for growers this year, so we thought it worthwhile to include for our readers. Tracer® is used in modular drench applications for young brassica plants to protect against cabbage root fly and to control severe outbreaks of caterpillar pests in the field. Sequoia® targets a specific pest spectrum and is being used for the control of aphids and whiteflies in protected crops. Next year, we will highlight the wide uses of Tracer for growers in fruit and vegetable crops.