Pest Control and Pesticides-74
 

 

 

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Project Leader and Principal UC Investigators

 

 

Pest control research projects funded by the Board have helped to provide many of the management answers needed by growers:
  • to avoid hazard to non-target economic plants, for example to surrounding fields and orchards (as in the case of propanil) or to later crops grown in rotation with rice;
  • to protect downstream water quality, both for reuse of water in agriculture and for human health;
  • to conserve and make the most efficient use of increasingly costly pesticides;
  • to recognize and prevent long-term buildup of residues in treated rice fields;
  • to meet increasingly stringent State and Federal air and water standards (and perhaps even influence them by providing research facts);
  • to assist the utilization of profitable and residue free rice byproducts;
  • to provide assurance of a toxicologically "clean" operation to an environmentally alarmed public and foreign market.

California rice growers have made increasing use of modern crop-protection chemicals. Among the herbicides, molinate, propanil, and MCPA have been prominent. We shortly hope to have a new one for submersed weed control, Hydrothol® 191. Selective weed control by chemicals has played a key part in facilitating the high rice yields of recent years. Control of seedling diseases and animal pests has been similarl important. For seedling disease control we now use Captan® and Difolatan®. For insect pest control we have Sevin®, copper sulfate, parathion, Furadan®, Bux® and malathion.

Your Rice Research Board fully recognizes the key relationship of agricultural chemicals for pest control to achieve economical rice production. We thus will continue to give priority to research needed to speed the reregistration of useful old compounds and to that required for registration of new ones.

þ In 1974 the Rice Research Board sponsored research findings and the data were presented before public hearings of governmental agencies responsible for environmental quality and public health. For example, we studied and made official recommendations on "The Recommended Water Quality Management Plan - Sacramento River Basin, San Joaquin River Basin, and Sacramento -San Joaquin Delta" in the official Public Workshop of the California Regional Water Quality Control Board in Sacramento, August 1974. From such hearings water quality standards will be established by the State for the main waterways of the Great Valley.

The Winter 1975 Rice Production Schools, sponsored by the University of California Cooperative Extension, presented rice research findings in depth for these areas. Accordingly in this report we will only highlight a few key items.

 

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