The most advanced compounds from Moa’s glasshouse screening move into our international field trial program. Field trialling tests our compounds in real world situations, with application methods closer to on-farm technology (albeit on a much smaller scale!)
Farmers in each continent have their own specific challenges, climates, and weed species, so we run a global trial program to ensure our compounds perform in a range of climate zones and crop systems.
The trial protocols are designed by our in-house agronomy team to ensure consistency across several countries, allowing the results to be collated and analysed as a whole. Experienced in-country research agronomists with in-depth knowledge of their local farming systems carry out the assessments, by comparing the new Moa compounds against both untreated plots (pre and post-emergence of weeds) and carefully selected commercial standards. In each plot several weed species are closely monitored over the course of the trial, with their growth assessed at pre-determined time points.
This Spring-Summer season we ran 45 trials across Europe and North America, and we are now preparing for a season of Southern Hemisphere testing in the second half of 2024 – which will involve further trials of the chemical classes tested in spring, as well as some new compounds coming through our pipeline. By the end of the year we aim to have field trials in seven countries, four continents, and at least three climatic zones.