The more efficiently crops take up nutrients, the better yield farmers get during harvest. Ross Bender, director of new product development with the Mosaic Company, talked about the importance of nutrient use efficiency.
?At a high level, nutrient use efficiency means maximizing the impact of our investment in fertilizer,? Bender said. ?At a macro level, our goal is to maximize that impact and have that plant recover as many of those nutrients as possible. That puts the plant in a position to be successful. That plant is developing the foundation for that growing season. There are different ways to tackle it. One of the best tried-and-true approaches to tackling it is through something called the four R’s. Right source, right rate, right time, and right place. Mosaic is a company that makes and operates in the crop nutrition space, aka fertilizer, so we have a particularly vested interest in the source, one of the four Rs.?
Bender said Mosaic helps farmers get more out of their fertilizer applications.
?Everything that we know about the cycling of nutrients and the availability of nutrients is influenced by the biology of the soil,? Bender said. ?So, we are particularly focused on advancing crop nutrition, mainly through the lens of ?how can we develop best-in-class biological tools to complement granular crop nutrition.? We’ve launched some new technologies recently, one of which is Bio-Path. It is a fantastic technology with a consortium of micro bacteria that enhances the efficiency of our crop nutrients. It can be used on or before planting or during the growing season, particularly as a tool to enhance nutrient use efficiency in corn.?
Bender added that continued success in farming is going to mean learning more about your crops every year.
?I would encourage growers to continue to be a student of the crop,? Bender said. ?Farming is hard. Farming is really hard when you marry a unique genetic package with soil fertility and the weather. My goodness, there are all sorts of different combinations of factors that that crop will experience throughout the course of that growing season. So, I encourage growers to continue to learn and be a student of that crop. I wish them nothing but the very best in 2023.?
For more information, visit mosaicco.com.
