Soil disinfestation is a process of controlling fungal pathogens, weeds and nematodes in the soil prior to planting. It represents an important practice for farmers in horticultural intensive systems to provide new crops with a pest free, or low pest, zone to start off with. Soil disinfestation is usually carried out, in the case of fresh vegetable production, on high value crops (e.g. tomato, pepper, eggplant, melon, and strawberry).
Fumigants are volatile, toxic, broad-spectrum pesticides, which today are still the product of choice for soil disinfestation. The reason is their unique ability to move freely through the topsoil as well as achieving and maintaining a uniform, toxic concentration in the topsoil over a limited time. Unfortunately, fumigants cause significant environmental pressures and also have negative effects on human health and wildlife.
Solarization, a non-chemical alternative, traps solar heat in the topsoil underneath transparent mulch, but it lacks the efficacy to control weeds efficiently and is dependent on lasting sunshine.
Applying non-volatile, safer modern pesticides uniformly and efficiently like fumigants in topsoil is a challenging constraint of current spray and chemigation technologies.
Controlled release of non-volatile pesticides from plastic mulches can overcome these constraints and also the risks associated with fumigants on humans and the environment. Approaches in the past failed because of the inability of the developed controlled release mulches to complete the pesticide release effectively before harvest in compliance with label requirements – the pre-harvest interval of the selected pesticides – as the prerequisite for safe to eat crops.
ADVASEAL® HSM is the first controlled herbicide release mulch to ever receive a worldwide pesticide registration. Imaflex is now taking it to the next step, by adding selective nematicides and fungicides to provide an effective broad band activity to replace soil fumigants in soil disinfestation.