A Dublin-based company is set to shake up competition in the UK's agro-chemicals market by launching two important off-patent crop protection products.

Specialist business, Life Scientific, will bring to market the first commercially available, off-patent mesosulfuron and iodosulfuron herbicides, Niantic and Cintac. And, it promises that they will be about 7% cheaper than the patented alternatives.

Both will be commercially available from January, 2018. "Bringing off-patent products to market faster than has been previously possible represents a significant step change in the pace in which off-patent products become available and this is increasingly significant in our current highly unpredictable regulatory environment," explained Life Scientific's UK country manager, Bill Lankford.

“Our approach is unique within the crop protection industry and is based on a strong scientific concept around the ability to reverse engineer a product from the original, meaning that the resulting product is accepted as comparable by the regulatory authority.

“All of our products have full generic registration and there are no parallel imports. The only fundamental difference to the original reference products is price – ours will cost less than the brand leader, so for growers and agronomists looking at their costs of production, we are offering crop protection solutions genuinely worthy of consideration.”

This has been successful in industries such as computing with companies like Dell, Compaq and others producing affordable clones of IBM computers, pointed out Nicola Mitchell, CEO of Life Scientific. “Through 20 years of specialising, we have built a unique capability in off patent science, which enables us to be innovative in all aspects of product development, and in all markets,” she said.

* Niantic is a water dispersible granule formulation containing 30g/kg mesosulfuron, 6g/kg iodosulfuron and 90g/kg mefenpyr.

It is ideally applied in the autumn at 0.4kg/ha to small actively growing weeds and provides good control of black-grass, rye-grass, wild oats, meadow grasses, common chickweed and mayweeds in winter wheat.

For black-grass control, it should be used as part of a programme with residual herbicides.

* Cintac is a water dispersible granule formulation containing 30 g/kg mesosulfuron, 10 g/kg iodosulfuron and 90 g/kg mefenpyr. It is a spring applied herbicide with a choice of two rates depending on target weeds.

It can also be used over a wide application window up to crop growth stage 39 and at full rate of 0.5 kg/ha, offers excellent control of brome species in addition to useful control of some key broad-leaved weed species.