The Power of Peptides - Part Three

Tim Hammerich

News Reporter

This week we’ve been reporting on a new approach to insecticides: that is using peptides instead of chemistry. This could be beneficial for extending the shelf life of other solutions, lowering pre-harvest intervals, and giving farmers another effective tool in the toolbox for controlling insect pests. But farmers need more than theory, they want to know how it has performed in the field. Ben Cicora is the vice president of sales and marketing at Vestaron, which makes these peptide-based products.

Cicora… “You know, we did a lot of work in terms of demonstration plots with large corporate type growers, and really focused in on some of the, what I'll call more key crops where they're looking for a solution. So when you start looking at a lot of your permanent crops, your tree fruit, your tree nuts, you know, vegetables with a lot of resistance issues. Growers, they were either buying product and putting it out in their rotation and trying to displace and just play with it a little bit, try and gain a level of comfort. But once they started to see at the end of the year, that there were no differences in terms of performance, whether it was a traditional synthetic they were using, or our product that displaced that in another 20 acre, 40 acre plot. The light bulb kind of went off in their heads and just, they understand that now I can make this application that same day at harvest and not have to worry about pre-harvest intervals.”

To learn more about peptides visit Vestaron.com.