Know Your Seed Treatments
Entomologist: Buy Treatments You Need, But Save Money; Don’t Buy Treatments You Don’t Need
MILAN, TENN.
The diversity of seed treatments was explained
recently by University of Tennessee
entomologist Dr. Scott
Stewart who is stationed in
west Tennessee at Jackson.
He and some of his colleagues
proceeded to educate
farmers on the
differences in seed treatments
and their value in
eliminating pests.
“When my career started
about 1995 we didn’t use insecticide
seed treatments
and now it’s 2012 and almost
every acre of cotton
and corn has insecticide
seed treatment and many
acres of soybeans have an
insecticide seed treatment.
So things have really
changed,” he said.
There really are only a few
active ingredients being
used. They have similar activity
and similar uses, but
there’s some little differences.
They are not exactly
alike and they’re not perfect.
So he discussed some of the
strengths and weaknesses
of seed treatments and tried
to eliminate some of the confusion.
“A lot of the confusion just
stems from nomenclatures
as we call it,” Stewart explained.
“Things are called
different names by different
companies; for example, we
use Poncho in corn, that’s
clothianidin, we use clothianidin
in soybean and it’s
called NipsIt or Gaucho, so you really do have to
read the active ingredients to know what you’re
getting.. Very often these things are packaged
with fungicides and they’re packaged with nematicides
in which case they change the name
and it may not say anything like Poncho or NipsIt
or Gaucho on it, so you really do have to read
the active ingredients to know what you’re getting.”
The rates for the different chemicals change
too. However, overall, the insecticide seed treatments
are a real win, win.
“In many cases I think they provide value to
the producers and value to the companies, and
if they didn’t provide value to the companies we
wouldn’t get the opportunity to use them. It’s
good to have a win, win situation. It helps us in
the long run.”
Insecticide seed treatments are vitally important
in cotton, and there really aren’t many alternatives.
Foliar approaches have been tried,
but insecticide seed treatments are consistently
increasing yields by 100 pounds of lint or more.
“You can’t even buy corn without an insecticide
seed treatment, and that, in itself, is an indication
of its value,” Stewart added. “Our
testing shows the treatment consistently increases
yield by four or five bushels, but sometimes
it can save you from complete
devastation.
“Soybean is probably the least responsive crop
I work with in regards to insecticide seed treatments
but there is value there if they’re used in
the right situations. In west Tennessee, insecticide
seed treatment are recommended in soybeans
that are early planted and no-tilled which
applies to many fields.
“The real take home message is, it’s confusing,
but if you get out there and you really dig
through the company literature, you look at the
university resources out there, I think you can
find what treatments are available. Once you
understand the options, you realize they’re
pretty similar,” he said. “There’s a lot of redundancy
in the chemicals used, and you become
pretty familiar with them. It’s really important
for growers to understand what they are paying
for, because our theme is seed and seed treatment
costs.
“A bag of cotton seed is $400 or $500 per acre.
Accidentally adding $15 dollars an acre because
you didn’t understand that you had a nematicide
seed treatment on that seed when you didn’t
need it is an unnecessary expense,” he
summed. Δ
BETTY VALLE GEGG-NAEGER: Senior Staff
Writer, MidAmerica Farmer Grower