Vive Crop Protection brings nanotech to crop protection products

Vive Crop Protection is launching a high-tech tool that makes familiar active ingredients work in new ways for improved performance.

It’s not often a new technology shows up on your doorstep, but an ag innovator from Canada is bringing nanotechnology to crop protection products. The company – Vive Crop Protection – is offering two new products for 2016 with familiar active ingredients but totally new delivery systems.

Darren Anderson, the company’s vice president for regulatory issues, talked about the company’s two new products Azteroid and Bifender during Commodity Classic. “We use a nano-technology shuttle to carry active ingredient where it needs to go,” he explains. That’s pretty technical, but if you look at the image on this page you’ll see what appears to be a web of material that’s holding tiny particles of active ingredients.

That web, or shuttle, is engineered to maintain the active ingredient in a suspended state until it gets where it belongs. “This is a new delivery system,” Anderson explains. And Vive is a relatively new company started in 2006 with academics from the University of Toronto who had a new idea and wanted to bring it to market.

Nanotechnology is a term for material science that works nearly at the molecular level. In this case that polymer “shuttle” is very small, yet large enough to be a carrier and protector for the active ingredient.

Azteroid fungicide has the active ingredient azoxystrobin, a fungicide a.i. that’s used by other crop protection companies. Bifender is bifenthrin. Essentially these are well-known active ingredients, but neither are known for use with starter fertilizer.

“Azoxystrobin usually separates in starter fertilizer,” Anderson explains. “However, with this technology the product stays thoroughly mixed until it reaches the soil where the fungicide is released.”