New seed treatment designed to boost cereal crops

By Ralph Pearce

Boosting nitrogen use to reduce nitrogen-based fertilizer applications, has been a feature of several products in the past five years.

Lalrise Start SC liquid inoculant aims to improve another key nutrient. The seed treatment designed to enhance phosphorus solubility has received full commercial registration and will be available in spring 2024 for spring wheat, oats, barley and rye.

Canola, corn, soybeans, pulses and winter wheat are also on the label and the product will be available for those crops in the future.

Traditional inoculants geared to pulses and legumes use Bradyrhizobium japonicum or Bacillus subtilis. Lalrise Start SC employs a new strain in its product formulation – Bacillus velezensis.

That strain is a plant growth-promoting rhizobacteria selected to increase crop establishment via improved root vigour and nutrient availability.

″What you have is a highly concentrated suspension that will give the seed a package of growth promotion because of a biofilm of these bacteria,″ said Matt Pfarr, field solutions manager with Lallemand Plant Care, the company behind the seed treatment.

″This product is very different because it’s going to focus on phosphorus fertility. We’re complementing the grower’s fertility placement because up to 90 per cent of that can get tied up within one year of that dollar being spent, so we want to give the grower back that 90 cents in availability.″

In research and registration trials in 2022, Lallemand showed a 38 per cent increase in phosphorus availability in situations where phosphate is tied up in an organic or inorganic (mineral) form.

The plant uptake can be 25 per cent greater in the early stages of growth, helping with establishment and early vigour and leading to potential for healthy grain set. In theory, it should increase the number of grains on the head.

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