Straggle Muster 161 - 24/6/2005

Warwick Catto, Ballance Agri-Nutrients

Key action items for winter:
- have you looked for brownheart or boron deficiency symptoms in your brassicas?
- have you had a nutrient budget done?
- do you need a soil test done?
Now is a good time to pin down that Ballance rep and plan ahead

As I write this in my great haste to catch a plane overseas, I contemplate that my trip is not quite the same nature as an Al Gibson or Jamie MacKay-led tour. Alas I will have to drink alone and discuss new ideas with myself.

One of the key outcomes of going to Europe for this trip (which our shareholders are paying for) is to visit the Yara research facility in Hanninghof Germany. With our focus in NZ moving more and more to maximise nutrient use efficiency we can learn a lot from some of there practices especially regarding nitrogen.

In NZ with caps on nutrient losses potentially being imposed e.g. Lake Taupo, or Rotorua lakes areas there suddenly becomes a driver for changing forms or types of nitrogen used and considering the roles of various types of nitrogen inhibitors.

An example of this learning is when the agronomy people from Yara first visited NZ they wondered why we used urea and not CAN (calcium ammonium nitrate) a very expensive form of N. CAN is non-acidifying and also has no volatilisation losses, hence no need to apply lime and more of the applied N is available for the pasture or crop.

So for their farmers when they were limited to say 200 kg N/ha, they wanted to extract the best value or response from every unit of N applied. So using a product like urea where 10% of the nitrogen could be lost via volatilisation, this loss suddenly becomes a significant economic loss in terms of lost produce which is significantly more than the premium they pay for that form of N. Hence urea is often not used whereas in NZ we have access to cheap lime and no constraints on N use hence efficiency has not been such a consideration when purchasing N.

The other area the EU is advanced in is defending fertiliser use with a tough environmental lobby. One of the key tools they are using is to show how fertilsier use efficiency does increase as use increases (to a point of course). This is expressed as kg produce per kg N used or kg N lost or hectare of land used. This has been particularly revealing when looking at organic systems in terms of land use or energy use per kg of out put.

So what is Ballance doing about these issues here at home?

As many will be aware from the media debates we are evaluating N inhibitors (DCD) in a range of soil types and environments across the country. This is likely to be a very beneficial tool in meeting NZ greenhouse gas commitments as our work is showing 75% reductions in nitrous oxide emissions when used. The other key opportunity it assists with is reducing nitrate leaching. However the biggest challenge is currently proving the product has value for its ability to increase pasture production as this is likely to be the main driver for its use unless there are nutrient use caps applied by regional councils in which case an economic value suddenly comes into play for its ability to reduce N losses by leaching.

The other key area of work is improving our understanding of how different fertiliser products can impact on phosphate losses. The ability to change products depending on runoff or leaching risk again will become important but we need the knowledge of how big an impact we can make.

So back to the short trip to Europe. The benefit for me and hopefully our company will be a better understanding of the future in terms of fertiliser practices and systems we may utilise here in NZ from the context of one of our major export markets.

Warwick Catto
Ballance Agri-Nutrients
Head of Agro-Sciences

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