USC’s New Batch Seed Treater Offers Versatility, Efficiency
November 1, 2015 
USC U-Batch seed treater
As many of our ag retail friends increasingly look to diversify service offerings outside of the core Midwestern staple crops corn and soybeans, ag technology providers in turn continue to adjust and tweak their go-to-market strategies in order to accommodate some of these new industry segments.
One such outfit is seed treatment equipment manufacturer USC, LLC (Sabetha, KS), which on October 1 announced the release of its newest innovation for the ag retail market, the U-BATCH treater.
U-BATCH, which was pilot tested over the past year at three retail operations in Illinois, Kansas, and South Dakota, has a seed capacity range of 100 to 2,500 pounds per batch and features an automated 5.7-inch touchscreen interface for control. It was, according to Todd Grimes, vice president of sales and marketing, designed as a complimentary piece for many of USC’s customers that already use the company’s LPX or LPV continuous flow set-ups.
“We’ve designed this batch treater to work with a full hard-sided box (of seed) — around 2,500 pounds or so — and really what we envisioned as the target segment was to work with those guys that are putting on a lot of the new biologicals or the new seed flow ability agents, really anything that could be considered an ‘over treat’ segment of the market,” explains Grimes.
Grimes says the company originally envisioned the U-BATCH making most of its hay with retailers doing a lot of add-on corn treatments, yet that notion proved a moving target as the three pilot retailers uncovered the versatile nature of the machine.
“We’re seeing it being used in soybeans and milo, and now we’re also seeing guys where they’re starting to take a look at how they can blend cover crop seeds with the treater,” he says. “They are very pleased with what they’re seeing with the disbursement of the different seeds in the bag after they get done treating, and we actually have a customer just 20 miles from Sabetha this fall that is using the U-BATCH machine exclusively to blend cover crops for his customers.”
Grimes also sees a niche for retailers applying flow ability agents on top of upstream (manufacturer) treated corn seed via the U-BATCH.
“Another beauty of this technology is, outside of the cover crop thing, we have the ability to not only apply liquid chemistries to the seed but we’re finding that this machine, especially in corn, there’s a lot of guys that are applying a dry flowability agent on top of corn — a lot of retailers are doing that as an added service for growers — when you put on the dry flowability agent on the corn seed and you apply it through this machine you’re getting the most consistent application of flowability agent on the seed that there is in the market.
“We really feel like we’re kind of just scratching the surface of the different applications that this technology can bring to us.”
Of course, using a batch treater isn’t always the best game-plan in all situations, according to Grimes.
“The drawback with the batch treater is you treat 50 units at a time for about five minutes per treating session, whereas with the continuous flow treater you can treat 900 units in 30 minutes,” he admits.
The U-BATCH can be used with a wide variety of seed types, allowing for more flexibility over continuous flow systems that can’t treat the smaller seed types like alfalfa and grass.
“We continue to look at different markets and different opportunities,” he concludes. “Being a Midwestern-based company, naturally we focus most of our time on the main row crops — corn, soybeans, wheat, and milo — but we feel very comfortable that there’s an adaptation that makes sense for U-BATCH as we look at the grass seed markets, the cotton market, some of the smaller seeds like alfalfa, etc. It’s one of our technologies that we’re trying to be very open-minded about.”
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