WILSON'S SEED MONEY

F. (for Francis) Perry Wilson is a farm boy who went to the big city 40 years ago and struck it rich, but he never quite left the farm. Now 57, the voluble Wilson still visits the family tobacco and cotton spread near Spray, N.C., that he owns with his three brothers. More important, as chairman and chief executive of Union Carbide Corp., he is turning the nation's second largest chemical company into a much faster-growing supplier to farmers. As he puts it, Carbide is "developing chemistry-based products to capitalize on the mechanization of agriculture."

Squeezed like all big chemical companies by rising costs and depressed prices because of an excess supply of products, Carbide is searching for new "convenience technology" products to increase profits. Last year the company earned $158 million on $3 billion in revenues, or 15% less earnings than in 1969. Now Carbide is having great success with Seed Tape, a ribbon of poly-oxide plastic containing seeds. Using a tractor mounted with a reel of tape, a farmer can plant a crop uniformly. The seeds are evenly spaced, and the tape dissolves when sprayed with water. This eliminates the costly problem of uneven planting, which often causes crops to mature at an irregular rate and forces farmers to reap several times. Seed tape has not only sold well to large corporate farmers but has also garnered about 6% of the home gardening market. Carbide is now testing tapes that contain fertilizer or herbicides as well as a single tape that will have both seeds and fertilizers.

An offshoot of Carbide's farming ventures is a $3.50 toy, "Nature's Window." Marketed by Ideal Toy Corp., it is a kit of seeds and two plastic disks containing a chemical gel that retains water; in it, seeds begin to germinate within a couple of days. By year's end Carbide expects to sell 15 million disks to Ideal.

Wilson's farming efforts are spreading from the land to the sea. The company has an experimental fish farm in Puget Sound, where it is developing plate-sized salmon; the only salmon now on the market are 30-to 40-pound-ers that are caught in the wild with a great deal of labor. These projects are part of Wilson's drive to develop more consumer products, which require less capital investment than the industrial commodities that now bring 78% of Union Carbide's sales. "It won't happen in my lifetime," says Wilson, "but some day we may be 50% consumer and 50% industrial."

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