Colorants for Agriculture Industry

There are three main types of agricultural industries that uses the dye:

• Crop protection industry
• Fertilizer industry
• Seed dressing industry

The purpose of the dye used here is for coloring of agricultural chemicals or in the identification process of agricultural chemicals. The basic selection criteria depends upon the following:-

• Dye color
• Color strength of the particular dye
• Color stability
• Compatibility of the dye with the particular agent

India has got a good rank in the fertilizer production over the world.
Fertilizers are often added with coloring to differentiate between qualities and to avoid any type of errors in application. Fertilizers are also colored for purely marketing purposes. Usually water based pigment is often used in the diluted form and is sprayed onto the fertilizer or sometimes incorporated into a melt.

The main objective of coloring the seed dressings is used for marking and for warning reference. To avoid any sort of confusion and making sure that it does not end up being used as fodder. The most important colorant used here is red with typical concentrations of 600 ppm.

Use of colorants in crop protection agents of the type insecticide and fungicides helps to clearly demarcate treated areas from the untreated ones. In addition, the dye stuffs also help in promoting safety in the handling operations.

Coloring of pesticides or herbicides is generally done by mixing chromatic pigments with dry powder formulations of the agents. Milori blue is a very popular pigment, that goes well with viticultural fungicides, other categories of pigments include lithol rubine, heliogen blue etc. Dyes used in the crop protection industry are Solvent dyes, Acid dyes or Basic dyes.