Storing glyphosate

[RMB68]

Hi all

I have half a knapsack sprayer full of diluted glyphosate which has been stored in my garage since last Autumn.Will it still be affective or does the active ingredients diminish over time.

[scraggs]

was using some last week that had been mixed over a year ago, appears to be a bit slower to act but is doing the job.

[farmer_ben]

Hi all

I have half a knapsack sprayer full of diluted glyphosate which has been stored in my garage since last Autumn.Will it still be affective or does the active ingredients diminish over time.

 

glyphosate is so cheap i would just stick another drop of the neat stuff in and spray that, dont bother using the old stuff. it becomes less effective after a matter of hours let alone months!

[MikeTM150]

I'd do what farmer ben says, just add a drop of new stuff, the old will possibly work fine if just a bit slow. Glyphosate is a very robust chemical. Not like some of the modern 'crap' we use, applied one last week that my agronomist left me with a note on the email ' don't leave in sprayer for more than 1hr without agitation otherwise it'll separate out like concrete'. That was very conducive to pouring it into a 4000litre sprayer and hoping i didn't have a breakdown!

[farmer_ben]

I'd do what farmer ben says, just add a drop of new stuff, the old will possibly work fine if just a bit slow. Glyphosate is a very robust chemical. Not like some of the modern 'crap' we use, applied one last week that my agronomist left me with a note on the email ' don't leave in sprayer for more than 1hr without agitation otherwise it'll separate out like concrete'. That was very conducive to pouring it into a 4000litre sprayer and hoping i didn't have a breakdown!

 

couldnt agree more, i have used some new sugar beet chemicals this spring that need to be agitated and kept agitated all the time. no stopping for a brew!

 

price of chemicals this spring is killing me. the t3 im spraying has got 5 different chemicals in it, including Proline!

[nepia]

couldnt agree more, i have used some new sugar beet chemicals this spring that need to be agitated and kept agitated all the time. no stopping for a brew!

 

price of chemicals this spring is killing me. the t3 im spraying has got 5 different chemicals in it, including Proline!

 

 

Not having a dig at your farming methods at all but isn't that a good advert for organic growing?

The subject is far from simple, I know that, but my limited experience of organic farming well done is that while output goes down by, say, 25%, input costs go down by considerably more. The more your chemicals cost the more the potential benefits increase but I don't know if organic sugar beet growing is viable...

 

 

Jon

[MikeTM150]

Not having a dig at your farming methods at all but isn't that a good advert for organic growing?

The subject is far from simple, I know that, but my limited experience of organic farming well done is that while output goes down by, say, 25%, input costs go down by considerably more. The more your chemicals cost the more the potential benefits increase but I don't know if organic sugar beet growing is viable...

 

 

Jon

 

We run 1200acres organic and contract farm 600acres conventional as well as running a contracting business, I can assure you its more like 50% decrease in yields and you have some real problems with persistent weeds like couch. You can end up spending considerably more money on diesel trying to 'stale seedbed' these types of weeds than you actually do when you just gave it a good dose of glyphosate!

 

It swings and roundabouts, some parts of our farm are unusable for profitable organic farming, so they're put into HLS wildlife schemes. But if the world really becomes short of food and there are higher levels of population starvation, is organic going to feed the world, No. I prefer not dealing with agro-chemicals, my father has Parkinson's and this is attributed to use of agro-chemicals, I know we are much safer about using them these days (cabs on tractors are good for a start!), but they still aren't exactly what one would call healthy products.

 

Organic sugar beet is grown in area's of the world where there is cheap labour (probably akin to slave labour) to hand weed the crops, and countries where I would suspect 'organic' might not be quite so 'organic' as the paperwork would lead you to believe! I mean, we use 'organic Chinese soya' for feeding our dairy cows, now honestly I know it has all the relevant paperwork and has been 'inspected and tested' but china is not a country that springs to mind when you think organic?

 

Like everything in life, they are two sides to everything and the worlds population is growing rapidly and the area of usable land is going down. That's a serious problem!

[MikeTM150]

couldnt agree more, i have used some new sugar beet chemicals this spring that need to be agitated and kept agitated all the time. no stopping for a brew!

 

price of chemicals this spring is killing me. the t3 im spraying has got 5 different chemicals in it, including Proline!

 

I started to do a mental calculation the other day when driving up and down the field spraying, of how much money's worth was actually in the sprayer, was doing some T3 on wheat and there was about 6 differents things, some trace elements included. I stopped shortly with the mental maths, the figures were getting too big and seemed a little scary!

[nepia]

Thanks for the lengthy response Mike. The success that I have seen is in very different circumstances to yours, namely beef and sheep reared on homegrown organic barley, oats and grass/clover leys. And in the north eastern tip of Scotland!

I take your point about the labour needed to make sugar beet a success organically; the same applied in Scotland to OSR; without chemicals it simply wasn't feasible.

A great shame about your dad but as you say agrochemicals have never been pleasant things to deal with and nothing like what comes in a 1 litre bottle at the garden centre!

 

Cheers,

 

Jon

[MikeTM150]

Sorry, looking back it did start becoming a rant! I had just come in from re-planting another 5acres of maize that the rooks had yanked out the ground as it was not treated being organic seed. 3rd piece out of the 120acres I planted, very very frustrating and the cup of tea obviously hadn't quite taken effect yet!

 

But yeah both have pro's and con's, and either way there's not hard set rule!!

 

Good Luck

 

Mike