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As increased agricultural insecticide uses and trends in insecticide resistance, increased labor cost to apply insecticide and limited its application to fertility season in green house. There is a need of a safe, labor-saving and confined space application concept to manage control tiny-scale insect pest such as thrips and whitefly. Fumigation with ethyl formate (EF), which is considered as effective to various insect pest and safely use in quarantine treatment, was evaluated in the confined space (glass house) and semi-confined space (vinyl house). The new application technology for application of liquid EF could be the one of the key options for control of tiny flying insects in greenhouses that would save labor and operation costs. It could be connected to smartfarm technologies in the near future.

There have been significantly increased reports of finding invasive quarantine pests with increasing import plants into Korea. Moreover, the efficacy and work safety issues have been reported regarding use of methyl bromide (MeBr) for fumigation of imported nursery plants. For replacement of MeBr use on imported plants, a new technology of using liquid ethyl formate has been registered in South Korea as FumateTM. The technology involved to mix ethyl format with nitrogen gas to form non-flamable ethyl format formulation. It has been evaluated on various imported plants. The FumateTM is recently developed and commercialized in Republic of Korea and Australia for quarantine treatments on fresh fruits, grains etc. Fumigation with FumateTM offers environmental-friendly and practically safe use of liquid ethyl formate. We have extended the use of liquid EF application technology to quarantine treatment of imported nursery plants.

Phosphine is a dangerous gas commonly used in fumigations throughout the world. Grain that has not fully released the phosphine it absorbed during fumigation may continue to desorb phosphine into the headspace of a storage structure. U.S. OSHA standards for handling phosphine state the acceptable limit at 0.3 ppm. If this limit is exceeded grain handling may become dangerous. It is important to understand the process of phosphine venting and desorption in order to ensure safe handling of fumigated grain in silos and during shipments. In order to achieve this, the venting and release of phosphine was studied on location in a well-sealed grain silo in Lake Grace, Western Australia, to serve as a set of data for verification of a computational model. This situation was then modeled using a 3D finite element model and compared to the real world results. Results were calculated using two fumigant desorption models based on previous literature, a reversed sorption model and an air-grain equilibrium model. Simulations reproduced accurate trends of desorption but did not accurately reproduce the quantity of fumigant, with a 55.5% error for the model based on reversed sorption equations and 86.3% error for the air-grain equilibrium based model. For both models, simulations were conducted to compare the effectiveness of existing grain venting regulations at producing grain that is within safe handling limits. These results highlight the necessity for continued desorption research and the importance of following venting guidelines.

The cylinderized liquid ethyl formate (EF) formulated with CO2 is one of the great potential fumigants to replace methyl bromide (MeBr) for fresh fruit. However, it is too expensive to adapt commercial practices, and also involves work place safety issue including handling of heavy cylinders as well as restrict emission of CO2, particularly for use in large scale commercial fumigationw. Therefore, it is urgently needed to develop environmental friendly, safe for workers and cost-effective alternative method for application of liquid ethyl formate as a MeBr alternative for perishable commodities. Recently, the environmentally friendly, cost-effective and practically safe use of liquid EF (FumateTM, registered name) with nitrogen gas has been developed and commercialized in Republic of Korea and Australia. The new technology for application of liquid EF is 100 times safer than MeBr in terms of threshold values (EF, TLV = 100 ppm). Ethyl formate is known as food additive and naturally occurred substances as well as a non-ozone depletion chemical. In this report, we demonstrate the liquid EF application technology that offers a clean environment (no ozone depletions and CO2 emissions), safe to fumigators and related workers and practically cost-effective technology to fumigation industry.