The Yara Growing a Nature-Positive Food Future Project outlines the benefits of complete, balanced nutrition over time to overall production and soil health. It looks at how biostimulants compliment a balanced nutritional program and reduce impacts of abiotic stress, increase nitrogen use efficiency and water use efficiency, increase yield and quality. It also examines using digital tools to aid in decision making and validate the benefits of products being applied.
Using a rotation of wheat and canola, the Growing a Nature-Positive Food Future project uses two treatments, in the same locations, four years in a row. The first treatment is a standard fertility treatment and second, a Yara complete, balanced fertility program.
The second treatment includes our patented micro -nutrient fertilizer coating YaraVita Procote BCMZ and our foliar fertility product YaraVita MultiCop. This year we will be incorporating our biostimulant products YaraAmplix Procote Optimize and YaraAmplix Optitrac. Designed to improve nutrient use efficiency, reduce the impact of abiotic stress and improve yield and quality.
We use soil moisture probes to help us understand what is happening below the soil surface, where we can not see. The probes measure the movement of water and can measure how much water is being used by the crop per day and from what depth in the soil. Over the last three years, the Yara treatment in both wheat and canola has been able to access soil moisture from deeper in the soil profile and has removed more water per day (and throughout the season) than the standard fertility program. When foliar fertility was applied in-season there was a significant difference in the amount of root activity and water removal in the weeks following. This validates the use of foliar fertility to enhance root activity and overall crop performance.
This project highlights the importance of a balanced nutrition program that does not add complexity to a grower’s operation. The grower does not have additional product volume to handle at seeding time, the retail simply coats the grower’s dry fertilizer blend they are already using with the Procote BCMZ. No additional handling is required by the grower. The foliar fertility products like YaraVita MultiCop are fully tank-mixable with most common pesticides. Removing the need for an additional pass across the field. Making it easy to incorporate in to the current operation. These benefits remove the complexity of adding the products to the operation. The overall benefits are gained in increased yield and overall quality of production.
Access the Discovery Farm Langham Field Reports
The Field Reports are an annual overview of all activities that happened at Discovery Farm Langham during the growing season including demonstration research, events and knowledge transfer.