Persistence of azadirachtin residues on olives after field treatment.

In this work an HPLC method for the determination of azadirachtin residues on olives was developed, and the field degradation kinetics of the pesticide was studied. In field trials the active ingredient (a.i.) decay had a half-life time of 0.8 days, which was too short to show a good efficacy of treatment. The mechanism of disappearance of the pesticide studied with model systems showed that it was unrelated to evaporation, thermodegradation, and co-distillation, but it was related to photodegradation. The high photodegradation rate of commercial formulations calls for the need to test different formulates in order to increase the persistence of the residue and thus the pesticide's efficacy.