Turkmenistan is in full swing preparing for the cotton sowing, for which 580 thousand hectares of land are allocated in 2023 and it is planned to harvest 1 million 250 thousand tons of raw cotton. In the complex of measures to ensure readiness for the spring sowing campaign, in addition to washing the soil, plowing and leveling the land, preparing agricultural machinery and units, the preparation of cotton seeds for sowing is of great importance.
According to the head of the department of agricultural sciences of the Academy of Sciences of Turkmenistan, candidate of technical sciences Ashyr Saparmyradov, the traditionally used mechanical method of pre-sowing treatment of cotton seeds leads to their damage and partial spoilage, and the chemical method of treating seeds with sulfuric acid vapor causes environmental damage to the environment. More effective is the biological method of seed preparation developed by the scientist, which has a number of advantages compared to mechanical and chemical methods. According to A. Saparmyradov, the biological method of seed preparation is a new word in cotton growing, and in the future this direction will be improved and widely introduced into production.
The essence of the method is to cover cotton seeds with a mixture of organic and mineral fertilizers in certain proportions, which makes their surface smooth and ensures accurate and economical sowing. According to the developer, this allows almost three times to save the number of seeds and significantly increase the yield of cotton. And the accuracy of sowing seeds by machinery will help eliminate the manual labor of farmers when picking cotton.
The coating protects the seeds from damage, moisture and environmental factors such as cold and drought. The biological method of seed preparation does not damage their shell, preserves the genetic structure, provides additional nutrition and healthy seedling growth, preventing the negative impact of salts in the soil and diseases on the tender roots of young cotton. Among other advantages of the biological method of seed preparation is the possibility of their long-term dry storage in warehouses and early sowing, in particular, 6-10 days earlier than with the conventional method.
According to the scientist, the biological method of seed preparation proposed by him, with certain modifications, is also suitable for other agricultural crops. For example, the use of this method when sowing wheat will reduce the amount of seed losses and get 4-4.5 million seedlings per hectare.
