The 2018 rice season reminds me of Christmas. You rip into the boxes under the tree and can’t wait to go outside and try out your new toys. This year, rice producers received a number of presents in the form of a new herbicide-tolerant technology, a new herbicidal mode of action and three new jasmine-type varieties.
And the gift-giving has just started. Speaking at field days last season, university weed scientists Bob Scott and Eric Webster happily remarked about the large number of new active ingredients in the herbicide pipeline. These are not just new products that involve combining existing active ingredients into a new premix but new modes of action coming to rice.
This will be the first season that Provisia rice from BASF will be planted commercially. The system involves the PVL01 long-grain variety, which was developed in conjunction with Louisiana State University AgCenter breeders to tolerate over-the-top applications of Provisia herbicide. As it has with Clearfield rice varieties, Horizon Ag will market Provisia rice seed.
The system was designed to help growers manage fields overgrown with red and weedy rice resistant to imidazolinone herbicides, such as Newpath and Beyond, used with Clearfield rice.
The former DowDuPont, now called Corteva Agriscience, is rolling out Loyant herbicide with Rinskor Active commercially this season. Rinskor Active is Corteva’s brand name for florpyrauxifen-benzyl, the active ingredient in Loyant.
A member of the Weed Science Society of America’s Group 4, the herbicide controls a wide range of grasses, broadleaves and sedges. It also brings a new mode of action to rice to help control ALS-, glyphosate-, ACCase-, PPO- and triazine-resistant biotypes as well as other Group 4-resistant weeds in rice.
And just when you thought you’d opened all of your presents, three breeding programs each gave gifts to the industry.
The LSU AgCenter released the new Clearfield jasmine, CLJ01. It has better yield than but comparable aroma to Jazzman-2, a previous LSU jasmine-type release. In addition, CLJ01 has the Clearfield trait, allowing growers to apply an IMI herbicide over the top to control weeds.
The California Cooperative Rice Research Foundation released Calaroma-201, and the University of Arkansas released ARoma 17 — both conventional long-grain jasmine-type rices. In addition, the California foundation released M-210, a medium-grain rice similar to M-206 but with resistance to both blast races found in the state.
I can hardly wait the eight or so months until Christmas to see what types of presents are left under the tree for the 2019 rice season.