Economic justification for applying instrumental methods of seed quality control

The basis of food independence of any country is a reliable seed system, and seed control is a concern of the state in many developed countries. The standard methods used for analyzing the quality of seeds do not meet today’s requirements for seed production, they are laborious, time-consuming, and also uninformative. The contemporary level of scientific knowledge requires the use of new instrumental methods that are highly informative. We have developed an instrumental X-ray method for assessing the quality of vegetable seeds. It is highly informative, quick and easy to perform, and preserves the material being analyzed. The article compares and economically analyzes the widely used standard morphometric method and the implemented instrumental method of X-ray analysis of seeds. It turned out that the use of instrumental methods for seed quality analysis is economically and energetically justified. The method of X-ray analysis of seeds favorably differs in energy efficiency and the period of performance from the standard method. Introduced instrumental method for visual analysis of radiographs is slightly inferior to the standard in labor costs, but the process is significantly accelerated with automatic analysis. The method is automated, which allows to avoid errors in assessing the quality of seeds associated with the operator’s subjectivity. The article calculates the benefit from introducing the X-ray method in the seed control case. It is shown that over a ten-year lifetime of the X-ray diagnostic unit, all the costs of organizing the laboratory pay off even with a relatively small workload and begin to make a profit.