STRATEGY A featured segment designed to share business- critical information to seed-selling professionals. Visit SeedWorld.com to download this department and other tools. Best Practices in Seed Treatment Operations Stewardship is fundamental to sustainable agriculture, and it all starts with the right information. Joe Funk jfunk@issuesink.com STEWARDSHIP INVOLVES IMPLEMENTING or sup- porting practices that protect or improve the quality of criti- cal resources such as water, air, soil, pollinators, wildlife and crops. It is fundamental to sustainable agriculture and begins with knowledge and information about the products or operations being managed. Information for best practices for using seed treatment chemistries begins with the product label. The Phillips McDougall Company, a global source of data and intelligence on herbicides, fungicides and insecticides, reports the cost of developing an active ingredient for agricultural crop protection including seed treatments has increased from $150 million or so in 1995 to about $286 million from 2010 to 2014. This includes $29 mil- lion for toxicology studies to develop and understand the safety levels of these prod- ucts. This information is sum- marized with a safety signal word on the label. Label Information “I just want customers to know and think about how much time and effort goes into establishing even what signal words need to be on the product label,” says Carroll Moseley, Syngenta senior integrated pest man- agement (IPM) stewardship manager for U.S. stewardship and regulatory policy. “The first thing people see on the label is the product name. It is there in large print. In smaller print, throughout the label, is important information about different sites and modes of action of each active ingredi- ent in that product.” Most all agricultural pes- ticide products have the site and mode of action identified on the front of the label. The label explains what the product is and why the product is there. For example, Syngenta’s Clariva Elite Beans is described on its label as an insecticide and nematicide with fungicides. It is a seed treatment product for protec- tion against damage from the list of insect and seedborne diseases. Directly under that description, the specific active ingredients are listed, followed by the percentage of active ingredients in the product. “This is not always easy,” Moseley says. “You have to make sure that you under- stand how these products cooperate and work with each other on that seed. You have to understand that if this treated seed is going to be stored for any length of time, that the treatment is safe and will not decrease the seed’s germination to any significant extent. That’s the tricky part,” Every chemical substance described in open scientific literature is assigned a unique numerical identifier by the Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS), a division of the American Chemical Society. The CAS number is linked to basic chemical product, safety use information. Each active chemical ingredient in a product is identified by a CAS number on the label. Perhaps the most impor- tant — and certainly the most expensive single word to determine — is the product’s 54 / SEEDWORLD.COM SEPTEMBER 2018 Andy Leuenberger serves as Syngenta Seedcare Institute global manager for training and stewardship.