The Agrochemical Industry

The recognition of differences in the pharmacological activity of enantiomeric molecules has created the need to administer them - and therefore to obtain them -as isolated enantiomers. However, nowadays this problem affects not only the pharmaceutical industry, but also the agrochemical industry and food additive producers, both of which are increasingly concerned by this subject. 

A large range of equipment and types of application procedures are used in the agrochemical industry, and field trial techniques, where possible, should mimic these practices as closely and as accurately as possible. 

Dr. Day was a founding member of the Pesticide Handlers Exposure Database (PHED) Task Force, and was instrumental in the development of the database, which is now widely used in the field of pesticide worker exposure. In 1994, he was a key player in the formation of the Agricultural Worker Re-entry Task Force (ARTF) and the Outdoor Residential Exposure Task Force (ORETF), and he served as chairman of the ARTF Technical Committee from its inception in 1994 until his retirement from DowElanco. Dr. Day also served as his company s representative on the Residue Technical Committee of the International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI) from 1989 to 1996. He continues to serve as a consultant to the agrochemical industry. 

Consider the following product design and evaluation problem from the agrochemical industry. A pesticide product consisting of an active ingredient and an additive need to be evaluated in terms of its controlled release characteristics from a polymeric microcapsule to a release medium. Here, since the AI and the additives (solvent and surfactant) are known, the product-evaluation problem consists of designing the microcapsule and identification of... 

Carmichael, N.G., H. Enzmann, I. Pate, and F. Waechter, 1997. The significance of mouse hver tumor formation for carcinogenic risk assessment results and conclusions from a survey of ten years of testing by the agrochemical industry. Environ. Health Perspect. 105 1196-1203. 

Taking into account its much smaller size, the agrochemical industry has been more innovative than its pharmaceutical counterpart. Ten to twelve NMEs have been launched by the agrochemical industry each year during the past 25 years. The future development of demand for agrochemicals will depend primarily on the fate of genetically modified crops. The question as to whether they will be generally accepted for human nutrition by the public... 

B.C. Baldwin and A.J. Corran, Inhibition of Sterol Biosynthesis application to the agrochemical industry , in Antifungal Agents. Discovery and Mode of Action , eds. G.K. Dixon, L.G. Copping and D.W. Hollomon, BIOS Scientific Publishers Ltd., Oxford, 1995, pp. 59-68. 

There are few important weed, insect or disease problems in major crops that have not been addressed and for which there is not at least one synthetic crop protection agent available to the grower. The challenges to the agrochemical industry are now associated with the search for novel, competitive products in an already crowded market, for which use... 

Jutsum, A.R. and J.C. Graham (1995). Managing weed resistance The role of the agrochemical industry. Brighton Crop Protection Conference-Weeds, pp. 557-566. 

The agrochemical industry - probably more than other areas of the current chemical industry - is still largely driven by product innovations... 

The limited amount of research invested by the agrochemical industry into this class of chemicals is reflected in the fact that there are only a handful of fluorine-containing plant growth regulators, or PGRs as they are more commonly known. 

To illustrate the use of experimental designs in an analytical chemistry application, we will examine a problem taken from the agrochemical industry. The problem under investigation was to develop a robust calibration model for several commercial products based on UV spectral measurements. By the term robust model, we assume that the model will be able to give acceptable predictions even if there is some moderate variation in the controlled and uncontrolled variables. 

The agrochemical industry is large, complex, and involves many facets and many players. Listing several of these, from multinational manufacturer to individuals who apply the product in the field, will help in visualizing the breadth of the industry. 

For the year 2000, it was estimated that the global sales revenue of the agrochemical industry amounted to US 30 billion. This breaks down as follows. 

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