Agrochemicals

Agrochemicals such as insecticides, herbicides, fungicides, and seed treatments help control pests and disease carriers and are also applied to augment crops to increase agricultural yield. Research and development chemists, pesticide synthesis and QA/QC operators are constantly evolving their products to address changing national and international laws, regulations and a changing climate. Testing for the potential downstream environmental effects to soil and water is becoming increasingly important to safeguard our environment.

Increasing adoption of biobased materials, or biopesticides are at the heart of today’s organic farming and environmentally friendly agricultural care. Although the EPA requires composition, toxicity and characterization testing and results, biopesticides are brought to market faster, often in less than 1 year.

Regardless of the type of agrochemicals being produced, active ingredient manufacturers, pesticide and fertilizer manufacturers, blenders, and contract labs employ a wide array of effective and robust chemicals analyses to keep up with changing regulations, safer crop protection, bringing products to market faster with automation and other tools, while battling supply chain shortages in raw materials and other pandemic related effects.

Although crop nutrition is critical to providing safe and healthy food to our growing population, growing consumer awareness of the potential ecological risks of agrochemicals is contributing to a change in the landscape of fertilizer and pesticides materials and formulations. After agrochemical application, concerns arise from chemical retention in soil, physiochemical properties, runoff into water sources, and post-application residual pesticide activity – all of which are driving innovations in bio-based formulations like biopesticides.

A host of analytical techniques are utilized by commercial and government soil testing laboratories, as well as industrial agrochemicals manufacturers, who routinely test soil, plants and media for nutrients content, retention and studies like exposure characterization. These analyses enable informed decisions to improve fertilizer and pesticide formulations and application practices. At key times of the year, soil testing labs and chemicals manufacturers may be required to analyze several thousand samples per day, necessitating robust, high throughput sample preparation, testing solutions and methods, many of which are prescribed by regulations.

The diverse analytical testing landscape of environmental testing labs requires a wide range of analytical solutions to meet the needs of purposeful inorganic and organic additives and contaminants.