Varro FX will be available for the 2024 season
By Diego Flammini
Staff Writer
Farms.com
Farmers in Western Canada will have a new crop protection product available to them next year.
Producers will be able to access Bayer’s Varro FX herbicide in time for the 2024 growing season.
“We call it a cross-spectrum herbicide,” Ashley Smith, Bayer’s crop protection west marketing manager, told Farms.com. “It brings the Group 2 graminicide to the market with a Group 4 fluroxypyr for a small broadleaf label that rounds out performance of key broadleaf tank mix partners.”
Varro FX is registered for post-emerge use in spring and winter wheat.
It helps control weeds like Group 1-resistant wild oats and broadleaf weeds like cleavers, kochia and wild buckwheat.
And its formulation is new to the Group 2 grass market, Smith said.
“It’s in an (emulsifiable concentrate) formulation,” she said. “What makes that an advantage for growers is that in the Group 2 market, the products we have today, are typically an (oil dispersion) or a (suspension concentrate) formulation. Those can be a little bit more difficult for producers to mix or clean out of their tanks, and farmers may have shied away from a Group 2 wild oat product for that reason.”
Varro FX can be tank mixed with multiple cereal broadleaf herbicides like Buctril M, Thumper, Infinity and more.
And the product doesn’t require an external surfactant.
This herbicide is important for resistant management, which requires a big picture approach, Smith says.
“Keeping track of populations of wild oats and grasses that come back every year and mapping out weed-resistant patches is important,” she said. “And then you match that with your management strategy, and it helps create a complete plan that allows you to optimize the molecules you’re using and help protect the products that we do have available.”
Farmers will be able to purchase Varro FX in 8.1 L jugs and 129.6 L drums for the 2024 season.
Bayer has more than 130 research authorization sites across Western Canada, and company reps will be at farm shows throughout the year to provide more information about the product.
Anyone interested in Varro FX is encouraged to contact his or her local Bayer rep, Smith said.