Australian, Argentinian Farmers First to Get Herbicide-Tolerant Sorghum
After five years in development, Pacific Seeds will be launching its imidazolinone-tolerant sorghum seed line across the summer cropping regions of Australia and Argentina beginning at the end of January. Although there are varieties of corn, wheat, barley, and canola that have been created to be tolerant to imidazolinone, this is the first strain of sorghum to be launched with the trait.
Pacific Seeds conducted trials in collaboration with BASF which performed crop tolerance screening on the technology which has demonstrated excellent performance under a range of growing conditions.
The seed, which features a proprietary “ingrowth” trait qualifies as non-GMO as it was developed using conventional breeding techniques. Often, plants with inbred imidazolinone tolerance suffer from yellowing of the crop and offer a short window of opportunity for herbicide application.