They’re nutritious and palatable, plus they give you a chance to improve farm performance by sowing new pastures after they’ve been grazed.
But as Nufarm Territory Manager Jeff Hurst cautions, two things can stop you getting the dry matter (DM) yield you originally planned for.
The first is that insect pests like eating forage brassicas and fodder beet as much – if not more – than your animals do.
The second is that leaves of these crops are naturally waxy, and hard to wet.
“You’ve probably noticed after rain or irrigation, water sits in discrete droplets on top of the leaves of brassicas or beet. These droplets look like little individual bubbles. In technical terms they have high surface tension,” Jeff explains.
Discrete droplets are prone to bouncing or rolling off the plant surfaces due to the angle of the leaf, leaf movement during spraying, or in windy conditions.
That means crop protection products mixed with water only and applied to protect your valuable yield often don’t cover the leaves thoroughly enough to catch all the insects or can bounce off and be lost in the soil surface.
Also, by this time of the season, Jeff adds, many crops are well advanced, with plenty of canopy, and pests have many places to hide where they are protected from spray.
Flume, a proprietary blend of organo silicone and non-ionic adjuvants can be added to your spray mix to stop the spray from remaining in discrete droplets. Preventing poor coverage and droplets bouncing off the leaves of the crop. It can help the spray reach all the nooks and crannies where insect pests like to hide.
“Flume is a super spreader,” Jeff says. “It reduces the surface tension of the spray droplets, flattens them out, and combines them into a thin, consistent film all over the surface of sprayed leaves, even wrapping around the underside.”
This technology is commonly used in horticultural crops, and it is very effective.
Flume is compatible with key insecticide formulations Kaiso 50WG, Attack, Dew 600 and Chlorpyrifos 500EC.
Flume spreads so well that you don’t need as much water in the spray solution when you use it for ground applications.
In fact, reducing water rate per hectare is essential to prevent the spray from running off the plant when you have added Flume.
The label rate is 200-300 litres of water/ha for forage brassicas and fodder beet, when you add Flume, you need to reduce the water rate.
Water and Flume rates depend on the maturity of the crop, and the crop being grown.
To find out more about using Flume to enhance the protection of your crop yields this growing season, talk to your local TSR or visit your Farm Source store today.
® Flume is a registered trademark of Nufarm Australia Limited.