Pesticide formulation

Transcription

I'm here to talk about pesticide formulation and why you should know about them but in a nutshell pesticide registrants formulate their products to make them safer, more effective, or easier to use. now that said they could send enough a particular product to a county and 99 percent techical grade in a really small package but they don't do that for a number of reasons for one thing the more concentrated the more toxic for another thing the more difficult it would be to measure for another thing a an individual user wouldn't want this much material and we certainly don't wanna invite redistribution or anything like that so products are formulated again to make them safer, easier to use, or more effective. now as educators we want to people to understand the properties formulations for a lot of reasons in every core manual there's a unit on formulation so on the certification exams leading to an applicators credential there's gonna be questions on that content in order to choose the proper application input you have to know what formulation you're dealing with. as an educator you are going to need to use materials when you teach pesticide safety education and teach many of the topics such as calibration, such as risk reduction in exposure. for example if your teaching somebody to calibrate a drop spreader something has to fall out of that spreader that you can collect and measure and show people how to calibrate it similarly if your gonna calibrate a backpack or a boom sprayer something has to come out of that nozzle if your gonna demonstrate incompatibility you're gonna have to mix products to show what happens when they're compatible when you are doing experiments for demonstrations are activities to model what to do and what not to do for pesticide exposure the folks have to have something to handle so the point of this next little bit is to show you some safe commonly use products that you can get your hands on easily and without a lot of expense that have the same properties that behave the same way as formulated pesticide products I'd like to start with about dry products we'll start here with granules and pellets and when I began this I was kinda thinkin granule pellets what's the difference while in fact a granule is a small piece of griddy material that you can simulate with kitty litter among other things but that's a good options on the other hand the pellet is a material that's cylindrical in cross-section and extruded solid and a true pellet, a real good pesticide pellet would be cut to specific lengths these animal feeds maybe not so much but for example if you request from are chemical company blank pellets they will come for example s very specific circumference in a very specific length like maybe an eighth of an inch but you could use most animal feeds in pellet form to be your fake pellets now for a soluble powder you've got plenty of options one certainly would be powdered sugar concentrated drink mix like gatorade or kool-aid would work, granulated sugar would work, but for many reasons I'm gonna kinda push the powdered sugar which may become obvious in a minute you can use for a wettable powder, flower and for a dust you can use talcum powder now let me show you an example of what I would do if many people are gonna have the life experience to understand why just said is right but if you have a bunch of newbies or youngsters that haven't had a lot of kitchen time they may not realize that even though all three of these the powdered sugar, the flour, and the talc look like white powder so if you put them in a dish or bowl or a petri dish they might be hard pressed to tell which is which. however, they behave real differently and you could either show them or show them the end result say okay which is the floater, which is the sinker, and which is the true solution and in fact when you put powdered sugar into water and stir it up you're going to get a true clear solution the only way you wouldn't know there's any sugar in here is the taste it on the other hand when you put flower in here which is like a wettable powder it sinks to the bottom and if you agitate it will form a suspension different from the solution because it's cloudy and if you let it alone the stuff's gonna settle to the bottom on the other hand the talc no matter what to do, no matter how hard you stir, no matter how hard you agitate it's not even gonna mix it's just gonna float on the top now the point you can make here is this is a sprayable formulation and you can use virtually any kind of spray application equipment for it this is a sprayable formulation too but if you don't have agitation you're not gonna have uniform distribution of the mixture and last but not least this isn't meant to be sprayed this is ready to use product that doesn't get mixed with water at all which is a good thing because it won't. now I want to talk about two specific dry formulation products for a moment and that is the simulated wettable powder as stated was flour and a simulated water dispersible granular or dry flowable product would be powdered milk for example I think you could use grits, all it's not quite as good a ecological equivalent. the thing is wettable powders kinda become a dinosaur formulations and the reason is they're messy you open the bag of flour and poof you've got some fine dust on you you have to reach down in the bag the scoop some out you're almost inevitably going to have some skin exposure then you have to take the stuff out and it was measured by weight so you had to put it on the scales and you had to weigh it and then because it doesn't like to dissolved in, well won't dissolve in water doesn't particularly like to suspend you had to either do like you were making gravy either have to mix it into oil and then add water or you had to use a tiny bit a water to make a slurry paste and then gradually add more water all the time agitating the tank or the stuff's gonna settle on so for whatever reasons this is become kind of a pass A formulation however it's tough for in some cases for these chemical companies to find a formulation that works and some folks who had materials that were best delivered as a wettable powder have now gone to this water dispersible granule or dry flowable formulation product and all the really are in a nutshell is this stuff squished into slightly bigger pieces now what you gain in a lot of ways they have the same pros and the same cons but what you do gain is ease of measuring someone from come with a little specific and this is a blank by the way some of them come with the product-specific pre-measured device for somebody else's waded then put the marks on the tube and all you have to do is turn the product upside down rotate a little device and it fills and if you get too much or in this case if you want to put it back like I do just turn it the other way and back down and the container goes some of them alternatively are made for open pores but again just like wettable powders they are not water-soluble their suspended in water you have to have agitation to keep them mixed up but what you gain in a nutshell is easy measuring easy transfer less likely to become exposed they're way easier to handle whether they come with this little device or whether you have to just poor them to a pre calibrated tube if you get a few granules I know they're gonna bounce off on the ground as opposed to be powers that are going to coach skin so they're way easier to handle and in many cases in most cases that I know of, these dry flowables water dispersible granules have replaced the wettable powders now sorta of as a transition truthfully between dries and liquids I'll talk for a moment about flowables. this is a real common formulation but what you have here in a nutshell is ground up fine particles suspended in just enough water to make make them poor, they are thick, they are goopy, they are hard to get out a container if you let a pesticide product that's a flowable dry in its container don't rinse the empty container right away its it's gonna harden in their be hard to get out a lot of the products that have this formulation or brand XF is what they use for that but basically this is nothing but ground up fine particles in a little bit a water so it will flow as opposed to pour the way the water dispersible granule did and good equivalent for that or good substitute for that would be Pepto Bismol many liquid formulations are your musafiable concentrates or concentrated solutions and the musafiable concentrate is a liquid material but it's got some kind of an organic solvent such that it does form an emulation or a suspension not a true solution one way to tell this is if I pour this material into water it turns cloudy and you can see that it's not a true solution it requires modest agitation to get it to remain as a uniform mixture on the other hand these true solutions do dilute and would form a clear transparent solution not a cloudy or milky suspension and last but not least for kinda blurring the line here this is a ready-to-use solution you've got both formulation packaging going for you because in many times not only are they ready to use but they're sold in there application or delivery device I'm gonna pick up here with what I talked about a second ago which is both a formulation and delivery method this is a ready-to-use solution but more often than not these things are sold in the delivery device at the application equipment and an aerosol is good example of that you've got a formulated product but in a device to delivered for example wasp and Hornet spray this allows you to treat the wasps and hornets without getting within striking distance so to speak so you can't reach out and touch them and they don't get you many pesticides are sold as fogs or fumagates again send you could simulate that with the vaporizer type thing when these plugins are one and the other type devices you can purchase microencapsulated unfortunately I don't know of any product they make now that's a little capsule you can see through and see the little beads in the in the capsule but timed release medicine can give the same effect is something with microencapsulated we also have materials now pesticide sold water soluble packaging as we have dishwasher detergent and medicines that are also sold in water-soluable packaging like these shell packs in this cleaner and then baits are kinda all over the lot you've got plenty of options and in some cases a granular or a pellet is also used as a bate in or out of a station you can buy them in blocks which perhaps this granola bar can help to simulate you can buy jail for ant and cockroach bates used to be that professionals could get it but now you can get ant gel at the big box stores to the grocery store and streak it along where the ants are walking and they go for the sweet gel which is also poisoning you can show that with some of this icing