One attendee at the National No-Tillage Conference this year asked Jill Clapperton about “the good, bad and ugly” on the effects of seed treatments and inoculants on soil health, be it for corn, soybeans or even cover crops.
“The inoculants are specific for the N-fixing species growers are using and should be plant-growth promoting rhizobacteria. “So, inoculating your legumes is good insurance,” she says.
In no-till systems, Clapperton adds, these inoculants can persist for many years or decades. “So, I never hesitate to inoculate your plants to make sure that they form nodules. That’s never a bad thing.”
As for seed treatments, Clapperton says the scientific literature doesn’t show they work all that well, “but they might be necessary depending on what rotations you’re going into. But they do inhibit the colonization of the roots. And you can imagine that, right? Some things just can’t go in and around the roots and they can’t work.
“Many people are using compost tea extracts and biological seed treatments that work quite well to inoculate the seed. It’s more like a rhizobium inoculant, but it's inoculant with beneficial bacteria and fungi and those can be valuable too.”
Read more advice from Jill Clapperton in the No-Till Farmer article "7 Soil Health Lessons – and More — With Jill Clapperton."
