History

The first International Symposium on Adjuvants for Agrochemicals was held in 1986. At Brandon (Manitoba, Canada) some hundreds of agchem specialists met each other and discussed the performance, prospects and use of adjuvants with agrochemicals. Since then every three years a next symposium has been organised. Proceedings of these symposia are available at the shop.

Since the first symposium - characterised by spirit and purity of academia and organised by enthusiastic volunteers - times have changed. The first ISAA proceedings have been published as books by CRC Press, as an issue of Pesticide Science and finally as independent paper publications. Since the ISAA 2004 symposium, proceedings have been published on CD.

For the first time an ISAA symposium will be fully organised by ISAA Society, in order to continue and improve formats and standards. ISAA 2007 already has shown this need for a professional organisation of the symposia.

Two decades after the first ISAA symposium the adjuvant field too has changed. Application and sale of adjuvants have reached a mature stage and experts expect a future for knowledge based and tailore made products. Last but not least the importance of generics has rapidly increased, which is refelected by the growing interest in formulation topics. The boom of generics too has contributed to the growing popularity of ISAA symposia.

Previous ISAA symposia have been held in:

Four previous ISAA symposium chairmen (from left to the right): Allen Underwood (1998), Mike North (2004), Hans de Ruiter (2001) and Jim Hazen (2007).

Virginia Techy (Blacksburg, Virginia, USA) was the location of the second ISAA symposium.

Churchill College (Cambridge, UK) hosted the third ISAA symposium.