Seed treatments don’t stand still, so neither should seed treatment testing methodology

From discussions with many of our customers, we see an increased need for highly targeted seed treatment packages, and hence tailored recipes. These recipes may add extra levels of complexity, with additional components such as biologicals and micronutrients being added on top of new innovations in chemical seed treatments and microplastic-free coatings. But at Bayer, we are committed to always providing the best customer experience. So we must rise to the challenge, delivering the right seed treatment packages while at the same time ensuring the high level of performance and reliability that customers have come to expect from SeedGrowth solutions.

How do we achieve all this, and incorporate tailored and multifaceted sets of ingredients without compromising quality? The short answer is that, just as our seed treatment portfolio evolves, so does the testing we perform, and the methodology that underlies it. Since much of this testing is ‘behind the scenes’, it can easily go unnoticed – but investing in constantly improving your seed treatment testing is a crucial part of being a leader in this industry. In our SeedGrowth Centers and our customer-facing operations, this is a responsibility we take seriously.

The first thing to acknowledge here is that, although we often talk about ‘quality’ like it is a single concept, it is really a combination of many different parameters. That’s why we have our overall DAFGAPP framework for testing our formulations. Because you don’t really test for quality – you test for dust, appearance, flowability, germination, active load, plantability and processability, among other things, and only by bringing these together can quality be assured. It wouldn’t be of much use to do just one!

Of course, some of our treater customers may be interested in one factor more than another. Perhaps their set-up has a large number of constrictions and conveyors, meaning flowability and processability are major concerns for them, but they have a powerful aspiration system so are not so worried about dust-off. Or, the complete opposite might be true. But for us at SeedGrowth, that’s academic: they are all elements of quality, so we have to test them all, and be confident that we can meet our own standards and those of our customers, in every way.

This brings us to the second important point: quality testing is not something set in stone, but is constantly evolving. At SeedGrowth, we are always looking for more effective ways to simulate ‘real-world’ conditions and smartly predict – and minimize – the risk that customers may face issues at a later stage. We review and optimize our methods not only for accuracy, but also for efficiency so we can deliver results quickly and fit within the narrow time frames that are an undeniable reality of treating seeds. Here's an example of one component of assessing processability: testing for build-up in treating machines over time. This is something that can gradually become a problem. It won’t happen after just one batch, so if you test a single batch of seeds in a treater then call it a day, you won’t catch any potential long-term issues. On the other hand, it’s not practical to test many tons of seeds for each formulation.

We recently came up with a new method for cereal seed treatments, where we treat several batches consecutively and then perform tests with a metal screw auger. Here are two photos from a recent round of testing – they tell you a lot about this method’s ability to distinguish between different formulations:

On the first image, you can see residue on the metal surface. This is a combination of the product and seed dust. The other image is a result from the same core product, but with an improved formulation recipe. It’s immediately evident that this has eliminated the problem. Good news for us: our formulation specialists had been working hard to come up with a built-in de-duster, so these tests have proven to be very successful.

The best thing of all? We only had to treat a relatively small amount of seeds to get this outcome. You can imagine what would happen if you treated many tons of seed in a commercial plant – this would lead to big layers of build-up, maybe even disrupting the treater’s function of distributing the seeds evenly or impairing subsequent processes where build-up can lower the seed plant’s capacity, potentially resulting in downtime for cleaning purposes. The auger method simulated this outcome in a far quicker time frame – in other words, it’s a ‘predictive’ testing model that can lead us to confidently forecast build-up levels without having to do prohibitive amounts of testing.

Finding these ‘best of both worlds’ solutions is the heart of our methodology at SeedGrowth!

Why should this matter to customers? After all, it’s only the ‘destination’ (reliably high-performing seed treatments) that matters to them, not the route we took to get there.

It matters because testing methodology is a significant differentiator between the seed treatment providers on the market. True, in some quality areas, there are already official standards or thresholds in place – such as the Heubach test, and the common 0.75g per 100,000 seeds threshold, for dust-off in corn seeds. But for many other areas, there are no commonly agreed thresholds, and every company approaches the matter in their own way. Potentially, there could be stark differences between various companies.

So, when you partner with a seed treatment provider, you are buying into their quality standards and testing, and you need to be confident in it. And at SeedGrowth, we are certainly confident in saying that our formulations offer excellent quality and will not lead to build-up or other issues. Why can we say that confidently? Because we have improved our methodology and testing. It’s what underpins all our claims.

And we still aren’t finished: we are constantly looking for new ways to improve our methods and pinpoint results. Take dust-off: as I mentioned, there is already a standard test for this, which is used industry-wide. But we don’t just do this test and move on. Whenever necessary, we apply also a friability test, where the seed is tumbled under unusually harsh conditions. This test complements our other results when looking into new products and new recipes. The results from this would have been reflected as part of the aggregate result in the Heubach test – but nevertheless, we take advantage of an even more discriminating method of assessing seed treatment quality, even going down to the level of subdivisions of our quality parameters.

It's complex, but the aim is simple: trying to make your tests echo real-world results as much as possible within practical limits. Every improvement we make, and every new aspect we test for, is another way of reaching our ultimate goal: a smooth and issue-free experience for seed plant operators in the seed treatment process, and farmers in the field.

Our testing operation never stands still – and that’s the way it should be!