Farm Shield launches new tech to enhance crop protection

Date:06-22-2020

Farm Shield has emerged from stealth mode to address the needs of crop protection companies with their proprietary platform technology. Farm Shield’s unique supramolecular host chemistry can broadly improve crop protection product performance and lower use rates, leading to an eco-friendly solution to safeguard crops globally.

“About 80 percent of crop protection products are off patent, so we thought, wouldn’t it be great if we can help those companies make their products better?” said John Appel, president of Farm Shield. “There’s a clear pull in our industry for sustainable practices, so we explored the potential of our technology to reduce effective rates and improve efficacy of different active ingredients.”

Validating internal product development results, Farm Shield has thus far been trialed with researchers at Syntech Research and Michigan State University on herbicides and fungicides.

David Coorts, technical director at Farm Shield, shared: “This is a unique approach to improve the many existing crop protection products already on the market. With our supramolecular host chemistry, we can breathe new life into these active ingredients. Empirical data from our research partners has shown substantial increased performance of numerous pre-emergent and post-emergent herbicides, for example, enabling effective rate reductions of up to 50-80 percent.”

The crop protection industry has been challenged with fewer new active ingredients being commercialized, relying on many products that arose decades ago. Farm Shield is poised to usher in this pivotal next-gen innovation.

“This is meaningful for crop protection manufacturers in that it allows them to out-perform the competition, reduce costs, allow existing products to meet more stringent regulations, and ultimately deliver more value to growers in a sustainable way,” said Appel.

Farm Shield is the second venture to emerge from BPS Agriculture’s portfolio of companies, with a third operating entity set to launch this summer. Farm Shield is available to license in the crop protection market.