Recently, Bryant Spivey, Johnston County Extension Director, with NC Cooperative Extension Service and others traveled to southern Virginia to look at an MH application system that lowers MH residue in cured tobacco leaf:
“Actually we were not learning about something all that new, but talking to a grower there that’s using drop-line applicators for Prime Plus, and that’s something that was used wide scale, say 20 years ago, but people left that application for sprayer applications.
But, the reason we would be more interested in that now, is because some of the leaf purchasers are more concerned about MH residues than they were in the past. Some are even asking the growers not to use any MH 30 or Royal MH 30. The purchasers are concerned about the residues in the cured leaf, and especially those in the European community have been concerned about MH residues for a number of years.”
Spivey says that the system that they looked at is not difficult to build, and costs aren’t that high:
“It would actually, in most cases, it would not be that expensive to implement. You would use existing spray equipment and you would just, in the place of a regular spray nozzle, you would put on a hose, probably six to seven feet in length, and you would have a hand operated valve with a spray nozzle at the very tip of that hose. So, you’d use your existing sprayer, you would just have to add on those hoses and a hand nozzle to make the application and you would use a very similar nozzle to the ones that are already used. But, by the time you buy the hose, and the hand valve and all that stuff, the pipe fittings and so forth it does add up to some cost. I put together a couple back in the summertime just for demonstration purposes, and probably growers would have around $50 to $70 per row in purchasing the equipment to be able to construct the drop line.”
Spivey says that new requirements from leaf purchasers is creating a need to find ways of sucker control in the field that leaves little or no MH residue:
“Some of the leaf dealers are asking that farmers deliver leaf that’s less than 80 parts per million, others are asking that they deliver leaf that’s less than 50 parts per million, and then others are requiring zero. And so, with our more traditional sucker control programs they all use Maleic Hydroxide as a component of sucker control, and with that we’re going to have some level of MH residue, typically.”
With growing tobacco and obtaining contracts more challenging every year, Spivey says that growers are putting in every effort to accommodate contractors:
“Growers are now in a position to want to kind of guarantee the level of MH residues. Well, growers can control a lot of factors that kind of add to what the final MH residue is going to be, those factors are things like the amount of the MH they use, the pressure that they use when they apply, the timing of when they apply it, and trying to do it at a time when they can receive some rainfall. But, the most critical factor in whether or not growers have MH residue in their tobacco is whether we get rainfall, and the most critical thing is that we get some rainfall within a few days of when the MH is applied. We don’t want it to wash the MH off before it does its job, but we don’t want a situation where the MH sits on the plant for two weeks without rainfall, that’s probably the worst scenario. So, even if growers decide to not go completely away from using MH there’s a lot of things they can do to reduce their MH residues, or potential for high MH residues in their tobacco. So, we encourage growers to do all those things to keep residues low so they won’t have problems with those that are purchasing their tobacco.”
Bryant Spivey, Johnston County Extension Director
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