Horticultural pest and disease pressure in the Wide Bay area of Queensland can be very high especially in wet seasons like 2022. It means local growers like John Warren need the right tools and management to make sure they are growing the very best quality produce for market.
Mr Warren and his wife Cassie run Makhoma Farms, based in Childers and Gin Gin, where they grow avocados, mangoes, lychees, as well as custard apples.
Insecticides play a key role in their chemical rotation, and most importantly, Mr Warren needs products he uses to be both efficacious on pests and diseases, while being soft on beneficial species.
It’s for this reason he was so keen to host a trial with Bayer in the recent season which included Sivanto prime, a new innovative insecticide registered in a wide range of tropical and subtropical tree crops.
According to Bayer, Sivanto prime provides excellent control on a wide range of damaging sucking pests like fruit spotting bug, banana spotting bug, plant hoppers in inedible peel tropical and sub-tropical tree crops including avocados, mangoes, custard apples and lychees.
“The trial here with Bayer is on a two-hectare Shepard avocado block, and includes Sivanto prime, Luna Sensation and Serenade Opti as foliar applications, and also Serenade Soil Activ through the fertigation system,” Mr Warren said.
“In particular, Sivanto prime is in the trial to control fruit spotting bugs, which are probably the biggest pest we have in avocados.”
In the trial, the first application of Sivanto prime was applied early, just after flowering, followed up three weeks later with a second spray.
Bayer’s Bundaberg based territory business manager Lore Saupp-Saunders has been helping Mr Warren with the grower-applied trial and said there are several characteristics which make Sivanto prime so effective.
“It's a systemic product, which means it is transported upwards by the xylem, so it's upwards and outward moving. It is also translaminar, which means it moves through the leaf,” she said.
“Through its inbuilt adjuvant package, Sivanto prime has a very fast uptake into the leaf and a very good retention, which means it is rainfast within five hours of application.”
Ms Saupp-Saunders said Sivanto prime also has a really good contact activity, which means if it contacts the insect, it provides a very quick feeding cessation and death of juvenile and adult stages of the pests.
She said the softness of Sivanto prime on beneficial species is also such an important factor for growers, with the product being safe to honey bees and native stingless bees when used as directed, meaning it can be applied during flowering. However, she said good agricultural practice would be to not over-spray foraging bees.
“Sivanto prime, when used correctly, is also safe on other beneficial species such as parasitic wasps, predatory mites, hoverflies, ladybird beetles and lace wings.
“The benefit of having a product that is safe to pollinators and beneficial species is that you can actually use it early on in a crop cycle to prevent pest damage and to retain the beneficial species population which then means less damage, and less spraying is required later in the crop cycle.”
The softness of Sivanto prime on beneficial species has been noted by Mr Warren when applying Sivanto prime during flowering as part of the trial work on Makhoma Farms where he didn’t observe any impact on beneficial species.
He said being a water soluble concentrate means Sivanto prime is also a “really good mixing partner” with other products.
“This is a grower-applied trial and we found that Sivanto prime was very compatible with the other products that we used, which for a busy farm means that we can be efficient in getting a fungicide and a pesticide on at the same time,” Mr Warren said.
The efficacy of Sivanto prime on the main damaging sucking pests in tropical and sub-tropical tree crops, along with its softness on pollinators and beneficial species, is set to make it a go-to tool in the control of pests.
“Sivanto prime proved itself here in the paddock at Makhoma Farms for efficacy and for its (low) impact on beneficial species,” Ms Saupp-Saunders said. “Because predatory mites were not impacted by the spray early in the season, Mr Warren didn’t need to apply a miticide to control pests, such as tea red spider mites, as they never flared.
“So, the upside is obviously that it's less spraying, it's saving costs, and no doubt we will establish in our post-harvest trial assessment that we will have a better pack out of quality fruit.”
Mr Warren said he is also enthusiastic about the future of the product in his operation.
“Moving forward beyond the trial, we will be using Sivanto prime in our orchards, the main reason being that you can apply it during flowering, which will be softer on your beneficial species and also being able to rotate different chemicals,” he said.
