US-based soil body pitches for optimum use of fertiliser

ASHOK B SHARMA
Posted: 2008-11-24 01:02:30+05:30 IST
Updated: Nov 24, 2008 at 0102 hrs IST

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India deposits rice, wheat seeds in Svalbard Vault

New Delhi, Nov 23: The US-based International Centre for Soil Fertility and Agriculture Development (IFDC) has urged the Indian government to promote technologies for increasing the fertiliser use efficiency and lend policy support to encourage balanced use of soil nutrients.

Speaking to FE, the president and CEO of IFDC, Amit H Roy said, “The fertiliser products available today and application methods in use are wasteful. Growing plants generally use only 30% of the nutrients in the urea that farmers apply. This means that two out of every three bags of urea that a farmer applies are lost.”

He said IFDC had developed urea deep placement (UDP) technology and rice growers of Bangladesh were adopting this technology to reduce urea loss. UDP increases yields by 25% while using 40% less urea.

Roy also said the current manufacturing process was expensive. “The energy equivalent of about four barrels of oil is used to convert free atmospheric nitrogen to one tonne of urea. Further after leaching and atmospheric losses, the energy equivalent of about 2.5 of these 4 barrels of of oil is wasted for every tonne of urea applied Also important is the energy wasted in transporting more fertiliser products than plants actually need,” he said adding fertiliser industry needs to develop energy saving technologies.

Regarding phosphatic fertilisers, he said India imported about 95% of phosphates in terms of DAP, phosphoric rock and phosphoric acid. He said the world’s known reserve of phosphate rock which would last for only 200 years with the current level of technology and rate of use. The cost of exploiting phosphate resources would rise as we exhaust the more readily accessible deposits. Phosphates would be an area of greater concern than nitrogen or potash in the next decade. Therefore efficient technologies are needed for processing phosphate and utilising phosphate rock directly from mines, he said.

Roy said “smart” fertilisers needs to be developed that would release nutrients only at the time and in amount needed by the plants. He also said generally plants do not absorb phosphate naturally available in the soil. Hence plants should be developed that exudate from roots to absorb the phosphates naturally available in the soil.

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