My speciality is the formulation of agricultural chemicals and my paper therefore deals with the art of developing formulations. Note that I said art, not science, because some of my friends tell me that they consider formulation to be some kind of magic practiced by conjurers and witches. Things really are not that bad. We do in fact rely on the laws of chemistry and biology. But the number of variables that we must pay attention to, and the sometimes conflicting requirements that we must compromise, are so numerous that we often cannot use a systematic or scientific approach to solve our problems, and intuition and experience play a considerable role. I am sure that you, as biologists, have full understanding for this situation.

During the last 30 years there have been significant evolutionary changes in the formulation and application of agrichemical products. Crop protection is now a sophisticated task, and quality requirements for crop protection chemicals are ever increasing. With agriculture under economic stress and with intense competition between existing chemicals and newly developing products of high potency, formulation development is evolving as an increasingly scientific multidisciplinary effort increasingly closely integrated with application technology.

No abstract