>> Seed treatment is definitely "targeted"...
> I have difficulty with that statement; few
> shoot at a target with a blunderbuss!
Neither view above evinces practical hands-on familiarity with crops that
are grown for profitable sale. The situation is far more nuanced and
complex than it may look from outside.
I merely grew high-end boutique hay for horses, but that was a complex
exercise in over-seeding clovers, lime-treating soil, and (I kid you not
even a tiny bit) GPS-synchronized, satellite-image-driven manure spreading
to a resolution of 3 square meters, followed by a decision to cut based upon
forecasts that are intentionally vague to prevent farmer assaults on weather
forecasters, and... a sudden shift to prayer that there would be no rain for
the next 3 days as the hay dried where it lay in the fields. Rain before
bailing would mean one had cow hay, hardly worth bailing at all. It makes
beekeeping look like a very low-risk undertaking.
The farming situation is skewed here in the USA. Much as the Almonds have
skewed many of the largest beekeeping operations toward a false "spring"
that takes place in February, the dominance of the Corn crop have skewed
growers efforts toward manufacturing a high yield of a product most which is
NOT intended for human consumption.
My farm was surrounded by dairy farms, and learned a lot from them about
subjects like feed corn. To start, you have to scour the seed catalogs, and
realize how complex and customized hybrid corn seed really is. There are
hybrids for every possible environment.
Pioneer lists 76 different hybrid corn varieties just for one zip code in
Iowa:
http://pioneer.com/home/site/us/products/corn/
http://tinyurl.com/n9ayswt
Dekalb lists 50 "top corn products":
http://aganytime.com/dekalb/featured/Pages/Top-Products.aspx
http://tinyurl.com/nc6z4x5
And if you read this:
http://ers.usda.gov/topics/crops/corn/background.aspx
http://tinyurl.com/ox2au9p
You will see that Corn is currently 95.3% of all feed grain produced from
the first chart, and that they have terrible problems with stable yields in
the second chart. The jagged line spiking up and down by 20 points means
that weather, and to a far lesser extent, pests, can take one's yield down
below the "break-even" point at random. The blue bars show that about 100
million acres are planted in corn, 1/4 of the total of about 400 million USA
acres planted with one crop or another. (For perspective, the total land
area of the UK is only about 60 million acres)
The third chart reveals that the growth in corn has been almost entirely
"alcohol for fuel use" (yellow). Note that the animal "feed" (blue) and
"other food" (red) bands are about the same size that they were in 1996.
One can't control the weather, but for a pittance per acre he can assure
himself that the Corn Rootworm will not reduce his yield. Yes, he can be
accused of engaging in short-sighted thinking, but go back and look at the
jagged red line in the "US Corn Acreage And Yield" chart, and note that the
downward spikes again. There are some locations where the rootworm is
well-established, and some places where it is not, but there are other pests
that are trotted out to justify the same seed treatments. They do less
damage, but are far more widespread. Seed corn maggots, Black cutworms,
Wireworms, Chinch bugs, Corn flea beetles, White grubs, Corn Leaf Aphids...
lots of pests. But Rootworm is such a big threat there is a rating scheme
to gauge the root damage done:
http://extension.cropsci.illinois.edu/fieldcrops/insects/western_corn_rootwo
rm/
http://tinyurl.com/pp7xz8h
So, there don't seem to be any areas that are completely pest-free, and can
thereby be said to "not benefit" from the seed treatment in at least some
small way. (I guess if I were to plant some corn in a vacant lot in Spanish
Harlem, that might be the only example. But around here, there are not yet
any urban dairy cows to feed, and the chicken-raising urban-techno-peasant
hipsters would only pay, umm... chicken feed.)
And the seed coatings are clearly far, far less risk to humans, water,
birds, and non-target species than the pesticides they replaced. If the
seed coating would simply stay on the seed during planting, we beekeepers
would not even be discussing this pesticide. I keep hoping that Bayer will
think to use the "Bayer Coated Children's Aspirin" machinery to put a some
extra coating around the treated seeds, a water-soluble and slippery coating
that would keep the pesticide in, and help "lubricate" the seeds through the
seed-drill hopper so that talc would not be needed. Likely it would slow
sprouting.
But even "yield" isn't simple. You'd think it would be the number of ears
and kernels of corn harvested. But corn "forage yield" includes the leaves
and stalks. Corn forage is fed directly to cows, or fermented into silage.
There are equations that estimate milk yields based on the "quality" of
forage, including the moisture content, dry matter, and so on. This corn is
grown as densely as possible, so seed treatments are a boon to the
operation, as there would be no way to get a spray rig into such a
densely-planted field:
http://ohioline.osu.edu/anr-fact/0011.html
http://tinyurl.com/nl7h5fc
Regardless of the hundreds of different seed varieties available, only a few
will be selected by the local co-op as "what they carry", limiting choices
for small farmers. In a similar vein, the large corporate farms buy in
bulk, and will also compromise between features and traits, trying to stay
away from buying different seed for every zip code in which they farm.
There is a cost to ordering something "special", and it is also a hassle to
get it to the right acreage.
But there's very little work that supports the claims that seed-treatments
like Clothianidin provide any significant yield improvement. There's
evidence that there is a only marginal and sporadic "advantage" to the seed
treatment when not specifically addressing rootworm:
"Clothianidin Seed Treatments Inconsistently Affect Corn Forage Yield When
following Soybean"
https://www.agronomy.org/publications/aj/abstracts/99/2/543
http://tinyurl.com/q82fnk6
"The Effect of Clothianidin Seed Treatments on Corn Growth following
Soybean"
https://www.crops.org/publications/cs/abstracts/47/6/2482
http://tinyurl.com/qzha6nx
"Seed-Applied Insecticides Inconsistently Affect Corn Forage in Continuous
Corn"
https://www.agronomy.org/publications/aj/abstracts/99/6/1640
http://tinyurl.com/oaz28rb
There's also seeds with GMO (such as Bt) attempts to stop pests, make weed
control easier, and so on:
"Agronomic assessment of Bt trait and seed or soil-applied insecticides on
the control of corn rootworm and yield"
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378429008002463
http://tinyurl.com/o8xvh4g
So, why do co-ops, farmers, and corporate farm buyers all like the treated
seed so much that it may be difficult to find untreated seed? The science
and common sense clearly say that one does not want to routinely use
clothianidin seed coating everywhere. But, for the price, it is cheap
"insurance", cheaper than the fuel needed to drag the sprayer through the
fields even once. Someone quoted a figure of $15 per acre added cost for
the treatments.
So, rather than being "targeted", treated seed can be viewed as very much
akin to those rope necklaces you see all the baseball pitchers wearing.
These are the worst sort of voodoo scam-artist medicine - "Phiten Ropes",
claiming to "stabilize your electric current inside the body" by "allowing
the flow of energy." The rope is claimed to have been treated with metal
that has somehow been "dissolved" in water - what they call "Aqua Titanium".
But the contractual MLB minimum salary is $480K, and the necklace is $50 at
most, so why not take a chance that it might help? "How can it possibly
hurt?", they think.
So it is with seed treatments.
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