Spurred on by the success of Uspulun, the mother of all cereal seed treatments launched in 1914, Bayer scientists in the 1920s intensified their efforts to find an even better successor. In 1929 their work came to fruition with the launch of Ceresan, a universal ethyl mercury-based dry treatment for cereal seed. If any seed treatment can be called a benchmark product, it is Ceresan. Although its mercury content was lower than Uspulun’s, Ceresan provided more effective protection against a broad spectrum of fungal diseases than any previous mercury compounds. Its unmatched efficacy in the prevention of common bunt and stinking smut in wheat, leaf-stripe disease and covered smut in oats and barley, ‘black leg’ in sugar beet, fusarium in rye and other cereals, and various diseases affecting peas and beans, for example, made it a benchmark seed treatment for half a century. 

Another advantage was the application flexibility Ceresan offered farmers – seed could be treated either straight after harvest or just before sowing. If applied to seed sown in autumn, Ceresan also helped prevent winterkill, the damage to seed caused by severe frost, snow mold or the rot caused by alternating periods of frost and thaw.

In post-war Germany concrete claims were made about the benefits Ceresan would bring: “Revenues of round 50 D-marks per hectare through increased yields on the one hand, a low-cost investment on the other.” Consistent branding, high degrees of user awareness and, above all, a top-quality product paved the way for half a century of success “in more than 50 countries of the world” (as another advertisement put it).

Export hit

Launched in Germany in 1929, Ceresan was an instant hit. The universal applicability of this dry seed treatment and the fact that it was a non-irritant were clear arguments in Ceresan’s favor. Just how quickly the use of Ceresan spread in Germany is indicated by the following figures: the amount sold in Germany in 1933 was enough to treat 4 million hundredweight
of wheat or rye; by 1939 the figure had risen to 10 million hundredweight. The growth in Ceresan usage outside Germany is just as impressive: the amount sold in foreign markets in 1933 was enough to treat 1.5 million hundredweight of cereals; by 1939 the figure had rocketed up to 8 million hundredweight.

The widespread use of Ceresan as a dry seed treatment was one of the main reasons why contract seed treatment became an economically viable business. Among other advantages, it was a matter of economies of scale. As the popularity and overall volume of seed-applied products rose significantly, it made sound business sense for farmers to contract out the job of treating their seed to specialist facilities at farming cooperatives or dedicated seed treatment firms. When farmers took their grain for drying, they had the next season’s seed treated at the same time. It cost no more than if the farmer had treated the seed himself and the strictly regulated nature of these specialist firms ensured seed treatment of high and consistent quality.