Benefits of Treating your Seed
Boost seed performance with seed treatments
Today’s seed treatments are easier to use than ever and the most economical way to reduce yield and quality losses from common diseases, like smut, fusarium, root and seed rot.
7 reasons to treat
All seed is an investment worth protecting
All seed is an investment, including farm-saved seed. Treating your seed helps ensure uniformity in your fields which keeps weeds down, makes timing your herbicide and fungicide applications and harvest easier. Simply put, treated crops like those treated with Raxil® PRO Shield emerge faster and stronger, which seen in a 2016 trial increased plant stand in 90% of the trial site.
It’s hard to go underground
Once seed is in the ground and a soil- or seed-borne disease starts to attack, there’s nothing you can do to prevent that crop loss. Seed treatments protect your emerging crop against early-season diseases and below-ground insects.
Comparing wheat seedlings in an untreated crop (middle) vs treated with Raxil® PRO (Right) or Raxil® PRO SHIELD (Left)
Disease might be present on and in your seed
The only way to know for sure is to get seed tested at an accredited lab. But many pathogens that cause head blights, smuts and leaf disease start off on seed that looks clean to the naked eye. Only a well-applied seed treatment can protect an emerging plant from diseases you can’t always see.
Raxil PRO and Raxil PRO Shield are both contact and systemic cereal seed treatments that protect your seed from seed and soil-borne diseases.
Spring can be hard on a crop
Snow in May? Frost in June? You know it’s possible. Seed treatments help give emerging crops an extra layer of protection through unpredictable spring weather. Treated crops emerge faster, stronger and more evenly than untreated crops for better performance and yield potential.
When treated with a seed treatment, seedlings develop a more robust root system and emerge faster.
Wireworms are sneaky (and costly)
Wireworms cause crop damage that often looks like something else, like a seeder miss, a dry patch or herbicide carryover. One Alberta study pegs wireworm damage to wheat crops at 1% to 50% annually1. Ouch. The problem is they do all of this underground so seed treatments are the only viable tool to use against them.
Wheat field with wireworm damage on a hillside
Your cows care
Your cows won’t get sick eating smutted wheat or barley, but they might go hungry. Smut replaces grain heads with spores so there’s no feed value left. Why spend all that time, fuel and energy growing and harvesting empty grain when a simple seed treatment can help ensure grain heads filled with nutrition, not black dust.
Smutted wheat heads
Treating was never simpler
