India: Verdesian adds to peanut farmers’ plant health options

Date:08-17-2022

″The Nutrient Use Efficiency People™″ at Verdesian Life Sciences are delivering a plant health lineup for peanut farmers with the addition of Primacy ALPHA^®, MicroSync^®, and SEED+™ GRAPHITE to their peanut product portfolio of offerings.

The three products complement the peanut industry staple, Primo Power CL, a standard production protocol for peanut growers and researchers, alike — and a product many farmers in the peanut industry wouldn’t farm without.

For Aberdeen, Mississippi, peanut grower Alan Atkins, Primo Power CL has made sense for his operation for several years, ″We started using Primo Power CL several years ago, and we’ve made good crops with it, so we’ve always stuck with it,″ he says.

The product produces a near 80 percent return on investment year-over-year and is always supplied as fresh product every year to ensure rhizobia counts are healthy and ready to go to work when the product reaches the soil furrow. In addition, improved stand counts through better inoculation and multiple selected optimized strains of rhizobia with a concentration of more than 4.5 billion colony forming units bolster plant vigor throughout the growing season.

To complement Primo Power CL, this year, Atkins is adding another Verdesian product to his peanut operation, Primacy ALPHA^®, a new product available for peanut growers to leverage in reaching the greater season-long plant vigor that leads to higher yields.

Primacy ALPHA^® offers the flexibility of foliar- or soil-applied application and works inside the plant to stimulate the efficient assimilation and utilization of nutrients. The increased plant metabolism and subsequent plant growth creates a healthier and more resilient plant, able to better withstand environmental stressors, pests and disease without any of the phosphite residue risks.

″Primacy ALPHA is a great substitute for those disease prevention products that create phosphite residue,″ says Larry Stauber, Verdesian Technical Development Manager. ″It can get a peanut plant healthy and keep it healthy to fight off leaf spots that are relentless in peanut crops without the phosphite residue.″

Also new for peanut growers in 2022, MicroSync packs the early-season micronutrient nutrition young peanut plants need to thrive. The custom blending and uniform granule size ensures the product spreads easily and uniformly with other macronutrient applications. The long-term, slow residual allows the product to feed both a crop and the bacteria that help a crop to thrive, ensuring micronutrients are present when the crop needs them most. And with eight different micronutrient packages, the application can be customized to address almost any soil test.

Rounding out the lineup is SEED+ GRAPHITE, a trifecta of performance and utility that combines soil microbiology support, a micronutrient package and talc graphite in a convenient and easy-to-use application that every farmer needs.

″The great thing about SEED+ GRAPHITE is that it is feeding both the bacteria and the seedlings,″ Stauber says, ″and it’s incredibly shelf stable and versatile. A grower can use it for multiple crops, when and where they choose to.″

With a lack of new chemistry options available in the peanut industry and input prices driving the necessity to increase yields with limited resources, the additions to Verdesian’s peanut product portfolio couldn’t come at a better time Stauber says.

″If we can add products to a grower’s current program and they can pull back on commodity fertilizers and other inputs while improving soil health across their farm, that’s a big win.″