The Plant Protection Product List for Tesco’s Nature’s Choice scheme has introduced a new requirement for blight control programmes this year.
The maximum total dose of active ingredient propamocarb has been set at 4,500g per hectare and programmes can continue to combine any of Bayer CropScience’s propamocarb-containing fungicides - Consento, Infinito, Merlin and Tattoo - within this limit.
The move follows concerns over occasional and low-level detection of propamocarb residues.
Branston and Greenvale AP are the two main UK produce marketing organisations supplying Tesco’s Nature’s Choice. The two firms will apply the propamocarb maximum total dose measure to all crops marketed in to them this year.
Branston’s field director David Nelson said: “Last year, both ourselves and Greenvale undertook extensive residue-testing programmes and found propamocarb in several samples, but at levels only just detectable and at a fraction of the maximum residue limit. So the intention of the new maximum total dose is to satisfy our retail customers’ desire for residue-free produce, without affecting growers’ ability to control blight.”
Greenvale pesticide technical manager Jon Williams added that the new requirement emphasises the importance of propamocarb to growers as it gives “truly systemic action needed to protect crops through the rapid canopy growth phase”.
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