S&W Custom Blends: A Strength of our Business
October 6, 2022 All Regions
Picture above: Custom Blend of Ryegrass, Renegade Red Clover, Compass chicory, Matua Prairie Grass, L92 Lucerne, Haifa White clover & Ranger Plantain
“Offering the best seed options to our farmer customers.” This is the S&W Seed Company promise.
Sometimes the best seed option may not be a single variety, but a complementary combination of varieties or species designed to utilise different resources within the paddock. This is where S&W Seed Company Australia’s Custom Seed Blends come in.
Custom blends can offer greater flexibility in the form of different rooting depths to utilise soil nutrients, varying canopy structures to maximise sunlight capture, or to add quality to a pasture blend late in the season.
The ability of S&W’s Territory Managers (TMs) to customise a seed blend to suite different soil types and management zones within a farm business gives our customers the capacity to maximise production and improve profitability. Working alongside retail agronomists and farmers, TMs use this tool to place complementary varieties in each management zone for the best results. Custom blends have always been an important part of S&W’s business, along with the traditional permanent pasture blends and annual ryegrass clover blends. Now multispecies cover crop blends, with 10 to 15 varieties – and sometimes more – are also gaining in popularity. These offer considerable biodiversity, which improves the soil biology. Another offering that is designed for pollination-dependents industries such as almonds, avocados and macadamias is the Pollinator Blend, which is comprised of flowering species that attract bees and other pollinating insects required by the crop.
“Offering the best seed options to our farmer customers. This is the S&W Seed Company promise.” Ian Freebairn, S&W Temperate Development Manager
At S&W, we are always focused on the changing needs and requirements of our customers. When the pasture seed sector moved to larger-capacity air seeders, S&W responded by investing in higher-capacity mixing facilities, with the ability to bag the custom seed blends into bulk bags up to 1,000 kilograms. This has created greater efficiencies for the farmer and contractor in the paddock, saving time and reducing the need to manually handle small bags.
Custom Seed Blends continue to be an important segment of the S&W business. It’s another example of our commitment to offer our farmer customers the optimal seed choices for their enterprise.