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Dr. Carla Yerkes joins us to help us tell the story of Rinskor and explain the process of herbicide innovation and the persistence and creativity it takes to develop new solutions for farmers. Yerkes is a research biologist at Corteva Agriscience and has a Ph.D. in herbicide physiology. She has spent about half of her 30 year career in herbicide discovery research and the other half in herbicide trait discovery.
I think what keeps me excited is the fact that we continuously need new herbicides. Weeds find a way to battle back, and weeds continually need to be controlled…We, meaning industry people that produce the herbicides and discover them, had better be looking for what the farmers need next. And so you have to be way ahead of the curve, looking for what is needed. - Dr. Carla Yerkes
Scott Foth also joins the show. As a pest control advisor with over his 50 year career advising farmers, Foth has worked with just about every crop grown in the region. He shares how Rinskor (under the product name Hulk) is making a difference in California orchards in the battle against weed resistance.
So the thing that I've seen with Hulk is you can take a mature fleabane or marestail that's already gone, got seedheads on it, and you can spray it and it will kill it all the way down. You don't have to respray it, where with other herbicides you've got to spray them, burn it back, and then in a month, six weeks, you're probably back in there spraying them again. And so with Hulk it has eliminated them completely, takes them clear out to the root. - Scott Foth
Rinskor has won both the EPA Green Chemistry award and the American Chemical Society Heroes of Chemistry Award. It is a great example of an agriscience innovation that has made a significant impact.
I have to say it's the most significant accomplishment in my career, and it is because it required a fair amount of creativity as well as persistence in order to make it happen. So I was proud of that, and I was proud of the fact that it worked, it worked well, and it's been great for rice farmers. It's very satisfying to see its utility expand into aquatics and into different crops because you could see the utility when you were working with it early on. - Dr. Carla Yerkes
A few takeaways from this episode:
- The value in the persistence to keep asking the question of “why” or in some cases “why not”?
- The importance of really understanding the use cases for technology.. Agriscience innovation is a two-way street between scientists and farmers and this is another great example of why that’s important.
- The future involves mining nature for more natural products or at least products inspired by nature.
Agriscience Explained is brought to you by Corteva Agriscience and hosted by Tim Hammerich. This show is produced by Clint Pilcher, Rayda Krell and Ann Leonard. Jaime Hammerich helps to edit these podcasts, and the music was composed by Dmitri Volkov. Subscribe for more Agriscience Explained: From Science to Solutions.
