Best Practices in Producing High Quality Treated Seeds

Seed treatment technology is a valuable agronomic tool that helps control early season diseases and insects, and enables high yield crop production in modern agriculture. Today, a typical seed treatment may include up to 10 different components including 2 or more fungicides, insecticide, nematicide, inoculant, biological, micronutrients, polymer and colorant – all leading to a complex recipe design and development process. Recipe components play a key role in the quality of finished treated seeds. A poorly designed recipe could result in poor product distribution, uneven seed coverage, and could negatively impact seed flow and dust-off characteristics. It could also lead to planter performance issues in the field due to product build up in the equipment. Hence recipe development and quality assessment testing are critical to having a good seed treatment product performance. Ultimately applying the optimized recipe using a properly calibrated equipment will result in high quality treated seeds that will deliver agronomic benefit for the grower.