Identification of a Pesticide Used in Lawn Care by vAPCI Compact Mass Spectrometry

At regular intervals throughout the year a local lawn service applies pesticides to the lawn surrounding the Advion headquarters in Ithaca, NY. The grass is very uniform and not a single dandelion or crabgrass plant is visible – so we wondered, what chemical do they use? After an application in the early spring, we sampled the yellow pellets and utilized the Advion expression^® CMS (compact mass spectrometer) coupled with a vapor Atmospheric Pressure Chemical Ionization (vAPCI) ion source to determine the unknown chemical.