If absolute placement of seed applied technologies is an effective way to promote crop protection early on, then the breakthrough Koasis™ soil additive innovations from Kannar Earth Science, Ltd. aids in fully realizing the commercial potential of your treated seed.
You see, dealing with difficult weather is a reality in farming: nature’s weather planner seems forever to send too much or too little water, too early or too late. No amount of seed treatment can combat drought, which is one of the hardest weather woes to manage. We at Kannar are excited to introduce and further develop our patent-pending range of solutions that we call Koasis™.
Koasis™ contains super-absorbent polymers that, in turn, help soil retain moisture. This aids with stronger crop establishment despite stresses from heat and especially dry soils. With Koasis™ applied in-furrow and especially deep into the ground during strip tilling, our technology proves valuable as a crop establishing aid in especially limited irrigation and non-irrigated crops.
While we are in early development, we are hopeful and have trials planned to verify conditions under which even just one irrigation cycle can be eliminated thanks to Koasis™, thus saving the grower irrigation expenses. And the water savings can be significant. Just consider a typical cotton grower in southwest Georgia with a three-tower irrigation system: even one round of irrigation requires just over half a million gallons of water at 1200 gallons per minute.
But that’s not all. Koasis™ offers the additional benefit of reducing leaching of fertilizers, nutrients, crop protection chemicals, biostimulants, etc. Rather than nutrients being washed out of the rhizosphere, these soil-applied crop inputs are retained and more readily available for uptake.
Koasis™ has a long list of major, game-changing attributes.
First, whereas most moisture retention polymers on the market today only remain functional in very dry air, Koasis™ can be applied even in high humidity, overcoming the risk of gumming up the equipment. Because it is functional in any humidity, Koasis™ can be applied with precision across large-scale acreage at low or high rates.
Second, Koasis™ is entirely natural. Plant-based, it eventually breaks down in soil to become food for plants and soil microbes. This also means it’s micro-plastic free: something we’re very proud of and something our industry increasingly values.
From an application standpoint, Koasis™ is very user-friendly. It can be easily applied with a variety of modern agricultural equipment and works alongside granular fertilizer.
Does Koasis™ work? Yes: impressively enough that observers of our trials can’t at first believe the difference it alone makes in crop establishment and growth. Additionally, we have found that it works as a carrier suitable for other dry ingredients, whether they be living spores or traditional chemistries.
While Kannar’s primary business is seed applied technologies, the heart of our business is crop establishment innovation. Seed application is a fantastic avenue to efficiently bring crop establishment technologies to crops. However, there’s only so much room on a seed before the additions become to cumbersome to handle. Through ongoing research, we’ve found that existing farm implementation, slightly modified, is a better option.
