Treatment Choice

Choosing a seed treatment for winter crops

Why use a seed treatment?

The past three seasons have seen extremes of weather, from the ‘Beast from the East’, to droughts and flooding. When you purchase your seed, you don’t know what conditions your seed will be drilled into, or the weather for the remainder of the season. It is important to give your crop the best start with strong establishment and rooting.

A fungicidal seed dressing provides protection from seed and soil-borne diseases, helps to ensure good crop establishment and lays the foundations to maximise crop yield and quality.

There are many considerations when choosing a treatment, but we have focused on two key areas below:

  • Protection from seed & soil-borne diseases
  • Improving rooting & establishment success
 

Seedling disease protection

Wheat

Microdochium and Fusarium are the most commonly found seed and soil-borne diseases in wheat and can significantly impact on establishment and yield. 

Impact of Microdochium nivale on untreated seed

Source: Syngenta  Trial 2012 Microdochium infected seed

It is also worth noting that it is in later drilling when conditions are generally worse and often exacerbate seedling blight diseases.

BERET Gold provides excellent protection, particualrly against Fusarium and Microdochium as can be seen below. 

For the best technical product for protection against seed and soil-borne diseases, upgrading to VIBRANCE Duo is a great option. The trials results above reflect this, but it is also thanks to the products proven rooting and establishment benefits helping to build a more resilient crop. 

Winter barley

The key diseases in barley are Loose smut and Leaf stripe. You can read more about them here

For control across the disease spectrum, Syngenta recommend the co-application of VIBRANCE Duo (now registered in barley) with a loose smut active partner, such as Ipconazole.

Loose smut

Co-application of VIBRANCE Duo and ipconazole gives excellent control of Loose smut.  

Microdochium

There are also great examples of where VIBRANCE Duo + ipconazole are reducing stem based browning. The below was an example in spring barley. 

Rooting & establishment

Wheat

VIBRANCE Duo can help build a resilient crop to insure against whatever challenges the season might bring.

Whether drilling early or late, VIBRANCE Duo has been proven to consistently give rooting and establishment benefits to help build a more resilient crop. Over the past two seasons VIBRANCE Duo has given very similar establishment  and rooting benefits over SPD. In 2017/18 this helped to deal with the Beast from the East followed by tough drought conditions.  

VIBRANCE Duo performs exceptionally in the below situations whilst bringing that all important yield benefit too:

The 'Vibrance Effect' stirkes again on Agrii iFarm

Gordon Rennie, host of the Agrii iFarm cereal and oil seed trials, experienced a tough season like many others. He shared with us the effects he’d seen from Vibrance Duo on his second cereal wheat plots, and how this boosted the crop’s resilience through a drought period followed by high rainfall.

Read the full story here.

Winter barley

The 'Vibrance Effect' can also be seen in spring and winter barley following successful registration this spring. 

VIBRANCE Duo + ipconazole gave 65% increase in foliage weight when applied to hybrid variety SY KINGSBARN, as well as 69% increase in root weight over 'Raxil Star'.

Berwick, SY KINGSBARN winter barley drilled 12th September 2019. Assessed 19th March 2020

The below trial also highlighted the great establishment benefits in winter barley.