University and the University
of Louisville. Under the guidance of Dr. Ray Stewart, the
founder of Landec Corporation, Dr. Balachander played a key role
in the early development of Intellicoat seed coatings. He became
manager of product and development in 1997; as project manager
in 1998, Dr. Balachander supervised all aspects of the
Intellicoat seed coating program—polymers, formulation,
application, testing, manufacturing and field studies. In
January 1999, he became the director of Intellicoat research and
development.
For the past three years, Dr. Balachander has led the
development and scale-up of three new commercial seed coating
applications: Pollinator Plus,™ Early Plant™
corn and Relay™ Crop soybeans. The Landec team
reformulated all three coating systems, using very carefully
developed laboratory and test plot results.
These coating systems have commercial applications. Seed
companies use Pollinator Plus—now in its third year of
commercialization—on male inbred corn for the production of
hybrid seed corn. Early Plant corn, an application that allows
farmers to plant corn up to four weeks earlier than normal, is
now in its first year of commercialization. The Relay Crop
application is a coating for soybeans that enables farmers in
the central and northern Corn Belt to plant wheat and soybeans
in the same field in the same year.
In the summer of 2001, the entire Intellicoat research and
manufacturing effort was moved from Menlo Park, California, to
Oxford, Indiana, under Dr. Balachander’s supervision. He
significantly expanded the manufacturing and research
capabilities for the Intellicoat coatings, while hiring a new
staff of competent technical and manufacturing employees. Dr.
Balachander was also instrumental in obtaining one patent for
the Intellicoat seed coatings, and another U.S. patent on the
Early Plant hybrid coated seed is pending.
Landec Corporation designs, develops, manufactures and sells
temperature-activated and other specialty polymer products for a
variety of food, agricultural and licensed partner applications.
The company’s temperature-activated polymer products are based
on its proprietary Intelimer® polymers, which differ
from other polymers in that they can be customized to abruptly
change their physical characteristics when heated above or
cooled below a preset temperature switch.
Landec
Ag