STRATEGY A featured segment designed to share business- critical information to seed-selling professionals. Visit SeedWorld.com to download this department and other tools. Seed Loading: A Delicate Business Explore the science and innovations behind what’s applied to the seed and how it all comes together. Julie Deering IN THE PAST decade, a great deal has changed when it comes to not only what we know about seed treatments, but how they are applied to the seed. Seen as a way to sustainably target pests and pathogens of concern during those first few weeks, chem- ists and formulation special- ists have been hard at work finding new combinations and creating ways to add more active ingredients, including biologicals. “Ten years ago, maybe one to three actives max were applied to the seed,” says Christophe Lupfer, who leads Seedcare application North America for Syngenta. “Today we have one product that contains up to seven active ingredients, and then we can add non-active products to the mix to help make sure the product stays on the seed and to get it just the right color for branding purposes, what we at Syngenta define as func- tional adjacent technologies.” BASF’s Justin Clark, a technical marketing manager, agrees seed treatments are where the action is at. “You are going to see some really innovative things that you haven’t seed from basic manufacturers, with biological products in what they can do in combination with chemical AIs,” Clark shares. “As we start to scratch the surface about what the different compo- nents on the seed can do for us, it’s important to take a holistic, on-seed approach, and look at the benefits you are gaining from each individ- ual component, because there are some many things going on with seed these days.” Ritesh Sheth agrees: “Everything is interactive.” As chief chemist for Stoller USA, he explains that it’s not as simple as just adding one product to a mix. “Adding one ingredient could be detrimen- tal to another ingredient,” he says, meaning balance and ratios are of utmost impor- tance. It’s easy to see the com- plexity of these formulations has only intensified during recent years and the addi- tion of biologicals (bacteria, fungus, micronutrients, hor- mones and growth regulators) only complicates the job of chemists who specialize in this growing niche. Syngenta’s Lupfer says that by adding biologicals to the mix, companies are able to remove some of the chem- istry, which is a good thing, as long as performance can be kept at the highest level for growers. Because biologicals are living organisms, he says they have more of a season- long affect versus a few weeks for other technologies. But again, you can’t just add a biological and remove a chemistry and call it done, Lupfer explains. As living organisms, different biologi- cals will vary in how they react to being added to the seed with different chemistries — sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse. One company that special- izes in plant growth regulators, which can be applied to the seed, is Stoller USA. Plant growth regulators are an essential compo- nent of a plant, says Sheth. On a tour of the Syngenta Seedcare Institute in Stanton, Minn., participants got to see just how many ingredients might go into one product. 50 / SEEDWORLD.COM SEPTEMBER 2017