The 26th Asian-Pacific Weed Science Society

The conference took place at Kyoto, Japan. Several Bayer Crop Science colleagues including the head of Bayer CropScience Japan Harald Printz and the Head of Product Development Asia Pacific (APAC) Thomas Wegmann took the opportunity to celebrate and support the introduction of two new solutions for APAC Council® and Alion® and to learn more about Bayer’s IWM program. Alion® with the active ingredient Indaziflam is a long awaited tool for plantations and resistance management. It is a non-selective product reducing labor costs and number of applications significantly. Council® is based on our new active ingredient Triafamone. It represents our latest innovation for the rice market with a wide weed spectrum. As an ALS inhibitor it comes mostly in mixtures to reduce the risk of resistance development.

In addition to the colleagues promoting these new product concepts Bodo Peters from the Weed Resistance Competence Center in Frankfurt gave a talk about Bayer initiatives to enhance farmers’ productivity and delay resistance in a sustainable manner. The cornerstone of his presentation was about the contribution of IWM to sustainable agriculture demonstrating how best weed management practices and customized agronomic solutions benefit to farmer profits, protection of the environment and increase farmers’ livelihood. In addition Bayer as the platinum sponsor of the conference had a big booth depicting our concepts for Integrated Weed Management (IWM) and launched the new IWM brochure dedicated to the rice growing systems. This booth attracted a lot of visitors which wanted to learn more about Bayer’s IWM program. A clear message of the conference shared by several scientists was that weed resistance is increasing, that new solutions are urgently required and all available tools must be leverage in programs and preserved as much as possible.