A series of workshops in the north of Australia’s wheat growing regions has helped farmers adopt some useful tactics when applying cereal seed treatments for themselves.
Treating retained seed is not new to many of these farmers who have through years of trial and error, achieved the feel for it, yet these workshops have proven to be popular for fine tuning their processes to achieve accurate coverage.
Application specialist and business development lead for Syngenta, Stan Noonan, says the principles of effective and efficient use of seed treatments are straightforward, though not necessarily easy to achieve.
“It’s all about the three C’s: clean seed, calibration and coverage,” Mr. Noonan said.
“When applied right, seed treatments are an excellent way to manage establishment pests and diseases with products such as CRUISER 350FS and VIBRANCE.”
Providing extra confidence around these workshops is the backing of the Syngenta Seedcare Institute, which sets the standard in assessment of seed treatment, globally, while having these resources available locally at their Wagga Wagga lab.
Every workshop begins with a reminder on personal protective equipment, maintenance of equipment from emergency shut offs to guards and everything in between.
Speaking of equipment, being able to weigh seed samples is essential and is equally important to an inoculation or pickling pot, in being able to accurately dose a set quantity of seed per minute.
Stopwatch and calculator apps are critically important tools too.
Clean seed
“Having clean, viable seed for treatment is a must.
“Poorly graded seed can cause seed treatments to bind with dust particles, chaff, cracked grain and weed seeds, leading to a loss of seed treatment, clogging of machinery and restricted grain flow at sowing,” he said.
“Starting with high quality, graded and cleaned seed is a must to achieve optimum coverage with the product you’ve selected, giving every seed this needed protection,” Mr Noonan said.
Calibration
The next thing farmers are urged to do is calibrate their equipment to work out the grain flow.
“You should do this by controlling your grain flow into your auger to achieve constant 50 to 60 per cent capacity of the auger for three minutes, calculating how much seed it moves,” he said.
“This will vary with crop type, as in from wheat to barley and from year-to-year. It is important not to skip this step.”
Using the product label and Syngenta-developed reference documents, growers can determine their slurry volume, which is the combination of product and water.
“Doing this will aid the application and ensure optimum coverage,” he said.
“To avoid under or overdosing seed, you also need to calibrate the application rate, so that the correct dosage per tonne of seed is achieved.”
Coverage
Finally, it’s essential to ensure you achieve good coverage of the seed.
“Good coverage is a combination of clean seed, calibration, and achieving the correct dose for each tonne of seed,” he said.
“To assess your coverage, begin with a small batch. It’s likely you will need to fine tune things.”
As the seed moves along the length of the auger the slurry is transferred from seed to seed, contributing to application quality.
As you can see from the photos, this makes quite a difference to coverage.
Visit syngenta.com.au/Seedcare to learn more about seed treatment processes and assessments undertaken at the Syngenta Seedcare Institute.
