When were pesticides first used in agriculture

On 25 November 2018, Professor Graham Matthews delivered an overview of pesticides - including their history, modes of action, current developments, issues and opportunities - to the Agrisciences group.

The first ‘sprayer’ was used in the USA in the 1850s to protect potatoes from the Colorado Beetle; it had a knapsack tank but no pump so the spray was fed by gravity to two “sprinklers”.

A pump on the knapsack began when the fungicide Bordeaux mixture was discovered in France. Nowadays, pesticides on large farms are applied with tractor mounted, trailed or self-propelled sprayers with tanks carrying 2000 litres to as much as 6000 litres of spray, applying usually up to 200l/hectare.

Such high volumes were difficult to obtain on small-scale African farms, so an ultra-low volume technique applying up to 3 litres of an oil-based formulation with a battery-drive spinning disc was shown to be as effective fo