What was it all about? 

The generation of pesticide residue, efficacy and crop safety data is required to support label registration and minor use permit applications made to the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority (APVMA) which, when approved, provide access to safe and effective chemicals for the management of pests, weeds and diseases.

In May 2018,Hort Innovation announced the securing of more than $1 million in assistance grantsunder the Federal Government’s Access to Industry Uses of Agricultural and Veterinary (Agvet) Chemicals program. This funding was used, along with levy contributions, to generate the data required for a range of registration and minor use applications across a variety of horticulture crops, through the project Generation of data for pesticide applications in horticulture crops 2018 (ST17000).

For the persimmon industry, the grant funding supported a Bayer DC-163 label registration application for the control of clearwing moths, flower-eating caterpillars and orange fruit borers.

Separate to the grant investment, this project also supported a new permit application for flonicamid for the control of thrips including plague thrips, redbanded thrips, greenhouse thrips and western flower thrips, as well as mealybug.

Data generation for other applications relevant to the persimmon industry was also supported by the project Generation of residue, efficacy and crop safety data for pesticide applications in horticulture crops 2017 (ST16006) which involved grant funds from an earlier around of the Agvet program, plus some levy contributions.