News

Innovative fungicide saves potato harvest

Safeguarding harvests: The new fungicide Infinito® from Bayer CropScience ensures healthy potatoes. Here Jonathan French (left) advises farmer Philip Mayhew on protecting crops.

Zoom image

Safeguarding harvests: The new fungicide Infinito® from Bayer CropScience ensures healthy potatoes. Here Jonathan French (left) advises farmer Philip Mayhew on protecting crops.

Monheim – A fungus by the name of Phytophthora infestans has been destroying potato harvests throughout the world for many a year. And the pathogen – which originated in Latin America – has been particularly notorious in Europe since it destroyed potato harvests in Ireland several times in the 1840s, causing a famine that killed one million people. In 2007 alone, it ruined crops worth €3 billion. In Europe, infestation has assumed unprecedented proportions. Yet the fungus can be stopped. The new fungicide Infinito® from Bayer CropScience is already demonstrating its outstanding effectiveness in potato fields in Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Japan and China. And the innovative fungicide is registered in numerous other countries as well.

Infinito® is based on the active ingredient fluopicolide, one of the newest substances in the fungicide portfolio of Bayer CropScience. The product’s new and unique mechanism of action leads to rapid destabilization of fungal cell structures, providing fast, high-level control of late blight and downy mildew diseases.