Rob Fryatt

This month I would like to salute the agents of change in the non-crop industry.

Those rare people who did not take the easy route, but created and fought for innovation, who thought ‘outside the box’ and, as a consequence, changed the market for the better of their industry. As the crop protection market has consolidated and matured over the years, so has the scope for innovation. For the major sciencebased inventors that remain in the market, the Holy Grail is a blockbuster molecule that can control several global pests or weeds, can be made worldwide on the minimum number of large production units and marketed under one global brand in a single formulation and pack. We can all list the successful crop protection molecules that have followed this route as a WP or EC and in more recent years as a microcapsule, WG or SC. Always in the standard 0.5, I.0 and 5 kg or litre unit.

It is not so in many non-crop market sectors. Years ago, the termite control market was dominated by chlordane with application methods aligned to bulk agrochemical markets with 20 and 200 litre drums shipped to pest control companies who applied the product as a soil drench before house construction. This method progressed forward into chlorpyriphos and the synthetic pyrethroids. But as regulators and consumers alike increasingly questioned this potentially environmentally unsound practice, it was the innovators who changed the market.

Salute the team in Dow who went to their directors and said, ‘We have an idea how we can put stakes of wood in the ground to monitor termites and when the termites are detected put out further stakes with small quantities of growth regulator chemicals that they take back to the nest which will eliminate the colony. This is potentially going to be a better practice that the consumer will eventually demand. We will not only increase the market value significantly, but be able to monitor every application of pesticide through an individual bait station bar code.’

They not only changed the market, but increased its value and enhanced the consumer perception of the pest management industry. They also stimulated competitors to invent improved termite baiting systems to match their Sentricon system and to look for alternative application systems. This included the further innovation of impregnated polymer barrier systems now increasingly available to the market. At that time, for every innovator, there were other senior management teams that could not think past ‘one size and formulation fits all’.

The same could be said for the innovators in Clorox and Rhone Poulenc with the development of cockroach baiting gels during an era when the roach market was dominated by a range of similar effect synthetic pyrethroids applied by the so-called ‘baseboard jockeys’. Today, 15 years later, roach gels will soon be as much a commodity as the off-patent synthetic pyrethroids they originally displaced. Similarly in the turf pesticide market, soil injection of fipronil innovated and changed the market from weekly sprays of contact chemicals to deliver a season long single application guarantee.

So where are the innovators of tomorrow? In the major crop protection companies or the smaller specialist companies that have to innovate and take risks to grow their businesses? Last year, Sorex launched Fortec, patenting the concept of foraging grains – innovation in rodent control which uses the natural foraging behavior of the rodent in a way never considered before. Could this be the true innovation the rodent control market has for years been searching for? Will innovative development of application technology in the use of pheromones from Exosect make pheromone use a more practical proposition to minimize
exposure to chemicals in critical food storage areas? As an industry, we must salute and support the innovators and the leaders of companies who support innovation, in what are still too often seen as non core business areas.
rob@xenexassociates.com
www.xenexassociates.com

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