We hired a seed person in the last year who quit his previous job in part because of an experience he went through last spring. A farmer called him up to come out and look at two hybrids he had bought from this person’s previous company. One had a good stand. The other stand was terrible with missing plants everywhere. The seed person called his boss who said, “Well, it’s no surprise, I guess. The second variety had about a 65% cold germination score.” As you can imagine, the person we later hired wasn’t too happy he wasn’t told about the poor germination test, nor was he proud to tell the farmer his company had knowingly shipped out bad seed.

When you look at a seed tag and see 95% on corn and 90% on soybeans as the germination score, you assume everything is good, right? Unfortunately, the warm germination score doesn’t help you out much when it comes to early planting. You may assume every seed company will have good cold germination scores, but in our experience, that is simply not true. However, there are a couple of things you can do to prevent disasters on your farm.

Most importantly, warm germination tests are run in the seed lab at 77 degrees!! That’s right. 77 degrees. When does your soil temp average 77 degrees? For me, it’s probably sometime in July. Since we like to plant at least a little earlier than July each year, I usually care most about the cold germination score, not the warm germ test.

Some people will tell you to run a saturated cold test, but since there is no industry standard for that, the numbers can vary wildly, and they often do not translate to the real world. Running a regular cold germination test is just fine. Since no seed company puts their cold germination score on the seed tag, our advice is to pick up your seed early and then send each variety (and preferably each lot) in for analysis yourself. If the scores come back below what you want, you can simply return the seed and plant something else. At Hefty’s, we do two things with our seed corn that, as far as we know, no other seed company does.

First, we aren’t going to ship out any corn below 85% on cold germination without you knowing it. If the cold germ score is low, we will give you a discounted (and in some cases, heavily discounted) price. If you are planting silage or for any other reason waiting until the soil warms up, low cold germ scores are no problem. We use some on our farm, and it works out just fine if you plant a few acres late.

Second, to help boost germination and speed up emergence, we have a seed treatment package with more than 35 components in corn and 75 in soybeans. I used to work in our seed lab about 25 years ago, and I could see real quickly that treated seed germinates better and faster with fewer deformed seedlings. Today, our seed treatment is leaps and bounds better than 25 years ago, and I wouldn’t even dream of planting my soybeans or corn without a modern and effective seed treatment package.

Every seed company has low cold germination scores. We believe most seed companies just ship that seed out as normal. If you are planting into warm soils, I’m positive you can find really cheap, yet super-high-yielding hybrids with high warm germination yet low cold germination scores. Otherwise, if you need a high cold germ test, either buy Hefty Brand Seed or bring your seed in early and get it tested yourself just to be safe. You can’t afford poor stands, and seed companies aren’t in the habit of paying for lost yield. Sure, you may get some free seed from them, but wouldn’t you rather have a thick stand and high yields? If any company has really cheap prices for you on one or more hybrids, that should throw up a red flag. You definitely need to test those varieties because chances are something is wrong with them.

I’ll leave you with this. If you don’t believe what I’m telling you, please talk to five other farmers you know. If you each test every single non-Hefty corn hybrid you purchase this spring, I would be absolutely shocked if at least one or two of you doesn’t find a hybrid that isn’t hitting at least 85% on the cold germination test. If you run some tests, please let me know how they turn out