By Robert Wachira

Towards the end of the 19th Century, a major breakthough in fungal control of diseases was accidentally discovered in Bordeaux region, France. To wade of passersby from eating his grapes that were along the road, a farmer used a mixture of CuSO4 and lime. This made the sprayed grapes look unpalatable to the passersby. However, to his amazement this grapes were not hit by downey mildew that struck the rest of unsprayed vines that season.

This was the beginning to of a game changer in disease control in what was then to be called Millardet-David treatment. Flash forward, to this day, copper is still being used by farmers across the world to control a wide spectrum of fungal infections and bactreria. Since the Bordeaux Mixture, many other copper formulations have been developed and released for disease control all over the world. Be that as it may, this has not left us without a fair share of problems.

Residues on leaves and produce
As it was in 1885, so it is now, no one wants to buy tomatoes, fruits or vegetables with a blue residue on it or any other residue for that matter. Therefore, after the use of powder coppers, farmers are forced to add extra labour to clean off the residue even after the Pre Harvest Intervals (PHI) have been correctly observed.

Secondly, unknown to many farmers, any other colour you add on the leaves masks the reception of light by the leaves that hinders optimal photosynthesis. In this case, disease is controlled but food resource build up in the crop is compromised. It is such a gamble!

Mastercop, does not allow you to gamble.It allows you to have your cake and eat it. Mastercop give all the benefits of good old copper fungicides but without the annoying residues on leaves, flowers, fruits, and other forms of produce.

Settling of Suspension in spray equipment
Most of the copper formulations form suspensions when mixed with water. This is an issue of distribution of the copper particles in the mixture. When this happens, the copper mixture may settle in the spray tank and requires constant agitation. Further, this may lead to the clogging of the same spray equipment.

In modern agriculture, the need to control soil dwelling pathogens is coupled with the possibility of doing so via drip irrigation. This can not be done with powder copper formulations because they also clog the drip lines. But even more importantly is the inability of this particle sizes to penetrate the leaf cuticle. Due to this problem, farmers have to use coppers at a higher application rates in order to have more copper particles distributed over the leaf surface. All the above problems come with serious cost implications, but also it ends up with a very high loading of copper in the environment creating new problems. It is such a hustle!

Worry no more! Mastercop is a true solution. This means that Mastercop does not form a suspension in water mixtures and therefore is a very good candidate for application via drip to kill the soil dwelling pathogen. Due to its solubility in water, Mastercop is higly bioavailable and very well distributed on the leaf and this leads to very low application rates peated against its powder counterparts. Mastercop is therefore very friendly to the growers spray equipment and drip lines.

Compatibility
Most of the copper formulations are not compatible with other pesticides. With this, they have to be sprayed separately and therefore it is more costly labourwise. In many parts of the world, farmers have reported compatibility of Mastercop with some of the most commonly used pesticides. It is however highly recommended to conduct a compatibility test all the time prior to combining any two pesticides.

Mastercop is a Master in much more…..

• Mastercop is registered at Zero (0) days PHI. It additionally has an OMRI organic farming certification
• Mastercop has a very broad-spectrum mode of activity including bacterial diseases.
• Mastercop is a must have in the spray program that helps the grower reduce on the total number of active ingredients
• Mastercop has a multisite mode of action playing a key role in resistance management in IPM programs
• MASTERCOP is an Original Chemistry manufactured by ADAMA
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Robert Wachira, is the ADAMA EAST AFRICA COUNTRY MANAGER This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.