Seed and Genetics Companies Editing and Proofreading Services

A grower drills at the usual rate and gets a thin, uneven stand. The seed lot certificate showed ninety-two per cent germination — from a test performed fourteen months earlier, on a lot that has since spent a summer in a shed, and against a standard the grower assumed meant field emergence. Nothing on the tag was untrue and every part of the misunderstanding was avoidable.

We edit what seed and genetics companies produce — seed lot certificates and tag copy, variety descriptions and performance claims, technical guides and agronomic recommendations, licensing and technology use agreements, plant variety rights and registration documentation, distributor and dealer material, trial reports and their summaries, and customer technical support content. Our editors work on the documents that travel with a bag of seed.

The seed lot certificate and its accompanying description is where a seed company's promise is made, and its failure is a set of figures presented without the conditions that produced them. A germination percentage is a laboratory result on a date, not a forecast of what a field will do. We work through these so the germination figure carries the date of the test and the method, since the number ages and a grower reading it in the spring is entitled to know when it was true; so the retest interval and any storage assumption are stated, because a lot held in a heated store is a different lot; so germination is distinguished from vigour and from expected field emergence, given that this single conflation causes more disputes in this trade than everything else combined; so purity, other seed count and any noxious species are stated with what was examined and how much of it; so treatment is declared with the product, the rate and the handling and disposal restrictions that follow the bag; so variety performance claims name the trials behind them with the locations and years, as a two-site claim is a two-site claim; and so the recommended rate is given with the assumption about establishment percentage that produced it. Certificates and tags written this way keep a season from becoming a claim.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including trial data, variety information, agreements and unpublished material. We are editors rather than seed analysts, breeders or agronomists, and we offer no view on germination, variety performance or agronomic decisions. What we can do is make the tag say exactly what it means.