By Jeff Burbrink
Ag & Natural Resources Extension Educator, Purdue Extension LaGrange County

Jeff Burbrink

LAGRANGE — Brand names are important. Sellers love to create a brand that people recognize and come to rely on, trust, and are loyal to. Think of Chevy and Ford, Coke and Pepsi, John Deere and Case IH. Sellers spend millions to build those brands, so when you walk into a store, you can count on what is in that package

In the garden and lawn care world, brands are pretty important too. People have come to recognize certain logos to represent reliable and safe. Examples of brands you will easily recognize include Scotts, Ortho, Fertilome, Burpee, Proven Winners, and Gurneys

Once a brand is built, the companies like to keep it alive as long as they can. The name recognition and familiarity has great value. It’s the same for pesticides (weed killers, insecticides, fungicides are all pesticides)

As new products come on the market, sometimes the active ingredients are retired. Take carbaryl insecticide for instance. Developed in the 1950’s, it was first branded as Sevin, one of the most recognizable names in the garden world. Carbaryl went generic years ago, so there have been many products made of carbaryl sold under many different names.

Today, if you see Sevin on the shelf, it probably does not contain carbaryl. The new active ingredient is zeta-cypermethrin in many of the current Sevin brands at the stores. The manufactures are using the old recognizable name on a completely different chemistry.

Is this bad? No. There are some good reasons to switch to other active ingredients, such as safety or immunity. Carbaryl has not been all that useful for potato bugs for years, for instance, but people keep buying it for that purpose because that’s what they always use

I think the most pertinent point is that things change, maybe in subtle ways, and that when you use products, you follow the label directions that are on that particular container. Those instructions are for the product inside that package. Next years product might be different, even though it has a similar name, and will have different instructions! Like we Extension people always say; Read and follow the label directions!

As another example, pay attention to products containing glyphosate. Sold under the trademark name Roundup for years, glyphosate went generic years ago, and has many names now. One feature of glyphosate that has both advantages and disadvantages is that it kills what is currently up and growing, but it has no residual or long-lasting control.

Several years ago, a new Roundup brand was added to the lineup with other active ingredients to give the product some long lasting control. The new product, called Roundup 365 can give you a years’ worth of control. That’s good, right?  Well, it might be, if it is used properly. The 365 product label states very clearly it should not be used over the root systems of plants like trees and shrubs. So, someone who has used Roundup to kill weeds in their gravel driveway that is lined with trees probably should not use Roundup 365 on that same driveway. It could result in tree injury or death.

There are several companies that now marketing these combination products, and I fear the number of cases of misapplication are going to rise. I do not blame the companies. The user is responsible to read and follow the directions on the label, which are very clear.