CHICAGO – At a corporate conference focused on sustainability and innovation, BASF said it plans to expand its approach to the ornamental market, starting by introducing products to help plants deal with drought and heat stress.
Jan Buberl, director of BASF’s specialty products department, said the company expanded its Intrinsic line of specialty products into the ornamental market this year. The product group, which includes an EPA-approved plant health label, has been shown to improve disease control, response to heat and mechanical stress and growth efficiency in plants.
Jan Buberl
The Intrinsic brand fungicide, called Pageant for the ornamental market, offers broad-spectrum control of fungal diseases, but Buberl said that the differentiating factor between Pageant and other fungicides is the plant health element.
When applied as the foundational fungicide in a plant protection program, Pageant Intrinsic increases the efficiency of photosynthetic processes and helps protect against environmental stresses that occur during production and shipping, like cold, heat or drought. Benefits can include increased fresh weight of plants and decreased number of damaged leaves during production, propagation and ornamental landscape maintenance. Buberl said improved stress tolerance leads to a more marketable plant that is more likely to be purchased.
“We want to give our customers a competitive edge by having better-looking plants,” Buberl said. “We want to actually make our approach to the marketplace bigger than pest control, weed control, disease control and insect control, because we see the chance to help them improve their water management, fertilization, and plant health. We want to tackle that down the road because we think there is untapped potential for our customers to have a more efficient system.”
BASF is bringing the fungicide to nurseries and greenhouses after researching the plant health effects in food crops for more than 10 years and in turf and ornamentals for more than five years.
“We have adapted this technology to our part of the market and taken it to the next level,” Buberl said.
The fungicide is highly effective on all four classes of fungi, helping growers control diseases such as downy mildew, powdery mildew, anthracnose, Botrytis, fungal leaf spots, Rhizoctonia, Fusarium, Cylindrocladium, and others.
While Pageant is effective from a preventative standpoint on downy mildew, Buberl hinted at a resistance management project BASF has in development. He also said a potential application of the Intrinsic plant health technology for the consumer market is being considered.
Buberl’s comments came during the company’s Agriculture Media Summit, which BASF hosts every two years. It brings together about 100 editors, technical experts and end users for a day and half of research and market updates.
And while the bulk of BASF’s R&D spending and investment is in the agricultural markets, that investment of time, energy and resources does impact the specialty industries. After an active ingredient is launched in the agricultural markets, it takes about two years to reach the specialty chemical business, said Tom Hill, communications manager for BASF’s specialty products division.
Annually, BASF spends $48.4 million – or about 9 percent – of its research and development budget on the specialty turf, ornamental and pest control markets.
We sat down with Buberl to get his take on the future of the ornamentals market and how BASF is planning to help growers prepare for what’s next.
What do you see as the biggest issues facing the ornamental market in the next 20-30 years?
Jan Buberl: Down the road, we see a couple of challenges. First, there are the changing demographics of the ornamentals customer. The new generation has a different appeal to gardening or to buying flowers. So how can the marketplaces create interest from that new ornamentals customer? It requires ornamentals that are easier to take care of. The customer has less time; he or she doesn’t want to spend too much time, so (the plant) shouldn’t be too complex to take care of.
Another issue, and the theme of our conference, is sustainability. It is becoming a key topic for key growers we’re interacting with -- making sure you have a production system that is sustainable.
The third challenge I would like to highlight is the economical part of the equation. Certainly the downswing of the economy was not favorable for the overall nursery and ornamentals market. It increased the competitiveness in the marketplace. So being efficient and supplying a differentiating product is very critical for our customers.
So: changing demographics of customers, sustainability of the production model, and competitiveness and differentiation. These are the key challenges for greenhouses and nurseries down the road.
How long before some of the ideas from BASF R&D will be ready to make an impact in the field?
JB: As in all segments of the marketplace, there are some nurseries and greenhouses that are early adopters. There are customers that see sustainability and the adoption of new innovations as one of their key elements of doing business, because they see an advantage to differentiate (their product offerings) and have a more economically positive outlook of operations. These customers are clearly in the focus of our innovation and sustainability launches.
But what will happen down the road is there will be a snowball effect. These people will change the habits of another segment of the marketplace. We will penetrate the market by focusing first on the early adopter, then the next groups will follow.
Which pests and diseases are on the radar as the next big problem?
JB: Downy mildew is certainly one. At BASF, we are very active in resistance management. As far as downy mildew, we have an innovation in the pipeline that we think can manage that. But we will share that down the road – it is in development.
For insects, we have some major resistance management challenges, like to reduce the use of chemicals in integrated pest management.
These are the challenges: resistance management around fungals or downy, and the other case is insect control. That is the key for us, and putting in a system that is sustainable and follow IPM. That is the focus for us, and we will also take that research direction.
BASF executives Harald Lauke, president, Competence Center for Biological and Effects Systems Research; Markus Heldt, president, crop protection division and Peter Eckes, president, Basf Plant Science Co., updated attendees on BASF's R&D activity and its plans for future growth at a conference in Chicago.
A GLOBAL FOCUS. With a global population predicted to hit 9 billion by 2050, companies like BASF are working to develop new technologies to make the planet’s limited supply of land produce more and more food.
“We all know the land is not growing. … With continued innovation, we continue to get more out of the land to feed the global population,” said Harald Lauke, president of biological and effect systems research at BASF. “In many cases, chemistry is the enabler.”
That chemistry allows farmers to grow more corn and soybeans on the same acre of land. But Chris Mallett, corporate vice president of research and development, Cargill, said increased productivity isn’t going to solve world hunger.
“One message I’d like to put up in neon if I can is that food security is a highly complicated area,” Mallett said.
Citing data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Mallett said 1 billion people worldwide don’t get enough to eat each day, and 38 percent of children in sub-Saharan Africa are malnourished. To feed everyone, he said, the world needs just 30 million tons of grain.
“We did produce enough calories to extinguish hunger,” he said. “Did we do it? No.”
MEASURABLE SUSTAINABILITY. As consumers, end users and suppliers continue to ask for sustainable products. BASF has developed AgBalance, a system to measure the ecological, society and economic impact of its products.
The system started 15 years ago as a way to measure efficiency and sustainability of BASF’s operations in the automotive coatings business. By examining a couple hundred data points like soil quality, nutrient balance, biodiversity, rates of worker pay, commodity prices and residues in feed and food, BASF can measure the sustainability of certain practices and entire businesses.
In 2011, the tool received independent assurances from three global agencies: The TÜV SÜD, DNV Business Assurance and NSF International.
“The whole purpose of the model is a snapshot of where we are today and what changes within those parameters,” said Nevin McDougall, senior vice president of BASF Crop Protection, North America.
The same model has been applied in more than 400 other industries including, in late 2011, agriculture, where it calculated a 40 percent increase in the sustainability of Iowa corn production during a 10 year period.
McDougall said the tool is currently being tested in the structural pest control markets, and will eventually make its way to the turf and ornamental segment.
“It’s still a biological system we’re working in,” McDougall said, “so all the parameters still apply.”
BY THE NUMBERS:
- In 2011, BASF filed for 1,050 new patents worldwide, more than any other chemical company, according to PatentSight
- Last year, BASF posted global revenue of E73.5 billion
- By 2020, the company plans to bring in E115 billion
- E30 billion of that goal will come from products and services that are less than 10 years old
- 23 percent of BASF’s overall research and development budget is spent on new segments and businesses
- Globally, 10,000 people work in R&D