I have a friend who has been in the seed treatment business for the last 20 years or so as a consultant.  I asked him about fungicides in seed treatments.  What he sent me was specific to soy beans, but he indicated beans are not atypical.  Bottom line is seed treatments have the whole cupboard thrown into them.  Quite often there are two or even more fungicides, both contact and systemic aimed at controlling different problems during germination.  He says it is normal to have insecticides, fungicides, nematicides and biologicals all combined in one seed treatment all aimed at controlling different problems.  From five to seven different products would be normal.  The combination picked is aimed to cover things like local soil types and local pest problems.

To some extent we all know that such treatments are partly insurance.  With no seed treatment you will always get some stand of crop.  But, in modern Ag you can not compensate for a poor stand by over planting as what happens is you get too high a plant density in some places and too low in others to allow either area to maximize yield.  There simply is no way to know when planting which area is which.  The top of the hill can have very different problems than the bottom of the same hill.  Weather during germination can even be a significant factor in what problems you have.

When I was a kid seed treatments were mercury compounds.  At least we have come a long way from that situation.

Dick


" Any discovery made by the human mind can be explained in its essentials to the curious learner."  Professor Benjamin Schumacher talking about teaching quantum mechanics to non scientists.   "For every complex problem there is a solution which is simple, neat and wrong."  H. L. Mencken

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