Don agrarians are actively preparing for spring sowing

The villagers of the Rostov region are already preparing for the start of the sowing campaign. Equipment on the fields for laying the future harvest should be released in the first days of March. Now is the most crucial time: you need to check the stock of seeds for sowing qualities and for infection with diseases.
Each huge bag, which farmers call a big bag, holds up to a ton of seeds. This is the ideal way to store planting material. Packed in this way, pea seeds are ready to be sent to the field. Prior to that, they were cleaned, calibrated and passed the main exam - research in the laboratory of the Russian Agricultural Center. This is a mandatory procedure prescribed for each farm by the law on seed production.
“If this is not done, we will not be able to treat the seeds with high quality. Because there are a lot of chemicals, and you need to understand which disease to treat. And if you do everything qualitatively - assessing the quality of seeds, good dressing, then there will be a good result, a good harvest, ”says Evgeny Streltsov, manager of Zarya Dona LLC.
To pickle is not to stuff it with chemicals at all, but to treat it with special substances that will help the plant fight pathogens. To understand with which ones, on the eve of each sowing campaign, these samples are taken. For example, chickpea seeds are a legume. Rosselkhoztsentr specialists act according to strict rules - the sample must be combined, that is, taken evenly from all layers of the pile. There is a special tool for this.
“When the windows are opened and the probe is immersed in the grain mass, the windows open and the seeds fall asleep along the entire height of the embankment. After that, the probe closes and the seeds are poured into the container, ”says Vitaly Prikhodko, head of the Oktyabrsky interdistrict department of the Rosselkhozcenter Federal State Budgetary Institution for the Rostov Region.
Each sample is labeled - warehouse number, lot number, crop name, variety and reproduction - and sent to the laboratory. Here, planting material is examined for a variety of parameters - purity, weight of a thousand seeds, humidity, pest infestation and disease infestation, germination. For example, the germination of pea seeds has already been determined here.
“It germinates at a temperature of 20 degrees, in the dark and on sand. We determine germination. If 96 seeds sprouted in each of the four hundreds sown, then we have a germination rate of 96 percent,” says Lyubov Kuraeva, the leading agronomist of the Rosselkhozcenter branch in the Rostov region.
Phytopathological examination is designed to find pathogens. Both legumes and cereals can have many of them - bacterial, fungal. And in some parties it may not be at all. In this case, the seeds do not require additional processing. But if, for example, ascochitosis or fusarium is detected, the situation will be corrected by etching.
“If the infection is from 5 to 10%, these are weakly infected seeds. When pickling, you can use a one-component dressing agent. If more than 10 percent infection, then a multi-component protectant is used. And there are batches where infection is higher than 60%, then we recommend culling these batches and replacing them with new ones, ”says Natalia Shmeleva, deputy head of the Rosselkhozcenter branch in the Rostov region.
All batches of seeds prepared for sowing are subjected to laboratory tests without exception. Before spring sowing, be sure to examine peas, chickpeas, barley, flax, grasses, seeds of row crops. The main goal is to use only high-quality planting material, this is the key to the future harvest. The first seeders, weather permitting, will go out into the field in early March.