New canola fungicide from Syngenta available for 2024

Jul 12, 2023

Miravis Star combines two proven active ingredients

By Diego Flammini
Staff Writer
Farms.com

Canola growers in Western Canada will have a new fungicide available to them for the 2024 season.

Syngenta’s Miravis Star combines two active ingredients to help control Sclerotinia.

The first is ADEPIDYN, which is the active ingredient in many Miravis products. It’s a Group 7 that is “potent, long-lasting and has a low application rate, and replaces many less effective conventional products.”

The second active ingredient is Fludioxonil, a Group 12 fungicide, said Jon Cressman, product lead for fungicides and insecticides at Syngenta Canada.

“That’s a bit unique to the market as it’s the only product that contains a Group 12 fungicide, so it’s great from a resistance management perspective,” he told Farms.com. “It’s more of a contact-based fungicide that inhibits fungal growth on the plant. And when you pair it with ADEPIDYN, it makes for a great combination.”

The product also provides farmers with greater application flexibility.

The Canola Council of Canada suggests farmers apply fungicides between 20 and 50 per cent flowering.

Miravis Star can be applied even earlier, Cressman said.

“Farmers can spray Miravis Star anywhere from 10 per cent to 50 per cent bloom,” Cressman said. “It’s great for farmers to help them maximize their time in the field and also to maximize their yield potential. Canola is an expensive crop to grow, and farmers want to make sure they’re getting every bushel out of their fields as possible.”

Syngenta conducted multiple field-scale and plot trials across Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta, putting Miravis Star up against competitor products.

Miravis Star provided an average 1.4 bushel per acre advantage at 70 per cent frequency, Syngenta’s data says.

And compared to untreated checks at the standard rate of 0.4 litres per acre, Miravis Star demonstrated a 23.7 per cent yield advantage.

Another 40 field trials are planned for this year. And once the trial results are in, Syngenta will share the data, Cressman said.

Anyone interested in learning more about Miravis Star can visit the product’s site or contact their Syngenta rep.

Also be sure to visit the Farms.com Field Guide for tips on how to control other crop diseases, pests and weeds.

Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids