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Importance of selecting the right soybean seed treatmentsImportance of selecting the right soybean seed treatments

Not all seed treatments are the same, so do your homework before choosing the treatments for your fields.

Curt Arens, Senior Editor

January 16, 2025

4 Min Read
Rob Jackson farms and is a Pioneer seed dealer in Knox County, Neb.
GET IT RIGHT: Rob Jackson farms and is a Pioneer seed dealer in Knox County, Neb. He offers seed treatments to his soybean seed customers depending on their individual needs in their own farming operations. Photos by Curt Arens

Numbers don’t lie. The popularity of seed treatments — pesticides added to seed corn and soybeans to protect the young seed in the ground — has gained by leaps and bounds over the past decade. According to a 2024 soybean producer survey conducted by the American Soybean Association and the United Soybean Board, on average, 90% of soybean acres reported in the survey were planted with treated seed.

Rob Jackson, who farms in Knox County, Neb., north of Bloomfield, also is a Pioneer seed dealer, and he has been treating soybean seed with his Gustafson seed treater for his soybean customers since 2009. He has the capability to treat seeds with a customized fungicide and insecticide package and with an inoculant package.

Plenty of options

“I can treat with just the pesticide package or just the inoculant or both, depending on what our customers want,” Jackson says. “But about 85% of our customers have me treat their seed with both.”

In the ASA/USB survey, farmers reported 72% of seed-treatment products were fungicides, 66% were insecticides and 34% were nematicides. Six percent of farmers surveyed reported other products such as biologicals to boost root development or deter pathogens, along with micronutrients aiding in nitrogen fixation. The rest reported using no seed treatments.

Related:New soybean pest found in Nebraska fields

“Our main pesticide treatment package covers insect pests like bean leaf beetle, early-season aphid, seed corn maggot, cutworm, white grub, wireworm and thrips,” Jackson says. “That package contains fungicides for four diseases including phytophthora, fusarium root rot, rhizoctonia [and] Phomopsis.” Jackson notes that many other dealers also offer ILEVO seed treatment, which protects soybeans from sudden death syndrome and soybean cyst nematode.

About one-fifth of the total soybean production costs were reported in the survey as seed and pesticides, including treatments. Farmers expected a yield loss on average of 6% to 10% from 2023 APH county yield estimates if they did not have access to seed treatments. ASA/USB reported that for a producer with 1,500 acres of soybeans, the lost revenue would be substantial — up to $65,400 for this example operation, just on soybeans.

Jackson says that in his own test plots, where he plants untreated and treated soybeans side by side, he has always gained at least two bushels per acre on the treated seed and up to five bushels per acre depending on the individual growing season.

Ed Lammers, who serves on the United Soybean Board executive committee

Learn by doing

Ed Lammers farms soybeans, corn, alfalfa and rye with his son near Hartington, Neb., while also grazing 200 stock cows and finishing about 500 calves per year. Over the past nine years, Lammers has served as a director on the United Soybean Board, working on the 11-member farmer-led USB executive committee for the past five years.

Related:Clinics offer practical, profitable methods to improve crop production

“With seed treatments, you have to know what you are dealing with,” Lammers says, adding that that especially means when conditions are cold or wet. “There are so many variables, but seed treatments in general give you the ability to plant earlier. We’ve documented this. There are multiple places where we’ve been hauling manure for 30 years, so there is more disease pressure in those spots.”

Learning from what Lammers calls “the school of hard knocks,” he could see those areas that didn’t yield as well because of disease pressure. “If you have pathogens that can disrupt seedling emergence, seed treatments allow you to adapt and expand to a certain extent, with the ability to plant early as the biggest benefit to those treatments,” he says. “Seed treatments also allow you to extend the planting window. Obviously, healthy plants do better, especially if they are healthy from the beginning.”

Lammers has tweaked his seed-treatment program over the years, listening to his local seed dealer and considering varied soil types and cropping history.

“The need to protect those seeds in the ground doesn’t always mean extra fungicide or another insecticide added on,” he says. “It might just be infected in a small area, so you have to weigh the economics of it.”

Last year, Lammers planted soybeans as early in the season as he had ever done, noting the improvement of seed genetics and seed treatments as the reasons he could do that, even in the unpredictable weather of northeast Nebraska.

“Every year is different, so we keep documenting how our practices are doing, and we learn along the way,” he says.

About the Author

Curt Arens

Senior Editor, Nebraska Farmer

Curt Arens began writing about Nebraska’s farm families when he was in high school. Before joining Farm Progress first as a field editor in 2010, and then as editor of Nebraska Farmer in 2021, he had worked as a freelance farm writer for 27 years for newspapers and farm magazines, including Nebraska Farmer. His real full-time career during this period was farming his family’s fourth-generation land near Crofton, Neb. where his family raised corn, soybeans, wheat, oats, alfalfa, cattle, hogs and Christmas trees.

Curt and his wife Donna have four children, Lauren, Taylor, Zachary and Benjamin. They are active in their church and St. Rose School in Crofton, where Donna teaches. The family now rents out their crop ground to a neighbor, but still lives on the same farm first operated by Curt's great-grandparents, and they still run a few cows and other assorted 4-H and FFA critters.

Previously, the 1986 University of Nebraska animal science graduate wrote a weekly rural life column, developed a farm radio program and wrote books about farm life. He received media honors from the Nebraska Forest Service, Center for Rural Affairs, Nebraska Association of County Extension Boards and Nebraska Association of Natural Resources Districts.

He wrote about the spiritual side of farming in his 2008 book, “Down to Earth: Celebrating a Blessed Life on the Land,” garnering a Catholic Press Association award.

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