By Lael Gilbert
When a farmer puts in 500 acres or more of winter wheat, they don't want any surprises. A century ago, there were plenty of them — seeds with low yields, poor germination rates, and introduction of weeds and diseases that could endure for years.
There was no guarantee, back then, that a supply of seeds matched the label on the bag. What was sold as winter wheat might have been genetically crossed with summer wheat, riddled with noxious weeds, or contaminated with fungal diseases like smut or blight. And often, the bad news didn’t become apparent until it was too late to correct.
Before Utah’s official seed certification program was established, farmers sowed more or less blind. It was a massive risk.
“We take for granted what a boon this program was to Utah agriculture,” said Michael Bouck, manager of the Utah Crop Improvement Association and director of the seed certification program at Utah State University.
2026 marks a full century of work on seeds in Utah: lowering agriculture risk with genetic identification, monitoring of seed quality, and creating agricultural reliability for producers, land managers, and restoration professionals throughout the Intermountain West.
The Utah Crop Improvement Association is the official seed-certifying agency for the state, and operates under the oversight of the Utah Agricultural Experiment Station at Utah State University. The partnership is a fortuitous collaboration between UCIA’s seed certification work and USU expertise in research, plant breeding and extension efforts at a land grant university.
Source : usu.edu