Several commercial seed companies are now covering annual ryegrass seed with a natural polymer that allows the seed covering to hold moisture amounting to about 400 times the weight of the seed.
The obvious benefit: when annual ryegrass is applied as a cover crop - either late in summer as corn or soybean crops are nearing maturity, or after harvest - it may be days or weeks before rain can germinate the seed. Even worse, however, is that the morning dew is enough to germinate but without additional rain, the sprouted plant can wither.
The polymer coating allows the germinated seed to withstand longer periods without water.
Increasingly, farmers are moving to aerial application of cover crop seed before harvest. With a polymer coating, there is some reason to believe that the amount of seed per acre could be reduced because of the polymer coating…making it more likely that the seed will sustain a dry period in the fall.
Please write to share info about this relatively new development in cover crop management. We’ll pass along new information as it comes in…and we’ll be working on some field trials this year to check it out.
Tags: Annual ryegrass, cover crop, polymer coated seed, seeding in drought conditions
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