fertilizer

"Nothing runs like a Deere," according to an old tagline for the world's largest farm equipment maker, and nothing lends like a Deere, either, says the Wall Street Journal. The company, which lends billions of dollars to farmers who buy its equipment, "is providing more short-term credit for crop supplies such as seeds, chemicals and fertilizer, making it the No. 5 agricultural lender."

Heavy rainfall in May washed the equivalent of an estimated 2,800 rail cars of nitrogen fertilizer down the Mississippi River and will create the third-largest fish-killing "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico in 32 years of monitoring, say federal scientists. They forecast a low-oxygen dead zone of 8,185 square miles, about the size of New Jersey.

The world's most widely grown crop, wheat, could become "a super nitrogen-efficient crop" if plant researchers succeed in cross-breeding a trait called biological nitrification inhibition into the staple grain, says the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT). Wheat plants use about 30 percent of nitrogen fertilizer applied to fields at present, but if the trait can be introduced into the plants they will become more efficient users and suppress loss of nitrogen from the soil.

Canada’s new tax on carbon, set to start at C$10 in 2018 and reach C$50 by 2022, could hurt the country’s farmers and fertilizer companies, says Reuters. Canada is in one of the world’s biggest grain-producers. But at C$50, the tax “would raise fertilizer prices by C$2 per acre for Canadian farmers, and some experts peg the total farm cost at C$6 an acre, according to the CIBC bank.”

Two Canadian firms, Potash Corp. and Agrium Inc., announced that they will merge, creating the world's largest crop-nutrient company, according to The Associated Press. The new company will have 20,000 employees, a market value of $36 billion and annual revenue of $20.6 billion. A name will be chosen before the deal closes next year, said the AP.

Synthetic fertilizer accounts for more than a third of the 1.8 million tons of new nitrogen entering California each year, and animal feed accounts for another 12 percent, making agriculture the largest single source of nitrate pollution in the state, according to a new report from the UC Davis Agriculture Sustainability Institute and the University of California division of Agriculture and Natural Resources.

Iowa owes its incredibly productive soil to the prairie—the same prairie that farmers have spent decades ripping out, says The Washington Post. Midwestern growers were long instructed to destroy native grasslands in order to make room for row crops. But a new program called STRIPS (Science-based Trials of Rowcrops Integrated with Prairie Strips) hopes to convince the state’s farmers that they can decrease soil erosion and fertilizer runoff by planting native grasslands in between their regular crops.

Fertilizer runoff could be reduced significantly if row crops such as corn and soybeans are replaced with perennial grasses harvested for biofuel production, say researchers from four Midwestern universities. Nitrogen runoff in the Mississippi River basin, blamed for creation of a "dead zone" each summer in the Gulf of Mexico, could drop 15-20 percent if switchgrass or miscanthus were planted on a quarter of the land now devoted to row crops, according to computer simulations.

The Natural Resources Conservation Service is on a nationwide mission to train farmers to protect the microorganisms in soil—and their relationship to crops— instead of destroying them with fertilizer and chemical sprays, says an Orion Magazine story produced with the Food and Environment Reporting Network.

Long-term monitoring of nitrate levels in 22 large rivers shows no widespread evidence of improvement, although nitrogen from fertilizer and livestock sources has been fairly stable since the 1980s, says the U.S. Geological Survey.

A study led by U-Minnesota scientists says emissions of nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas, from Midwest streams may be much larger than thought.

Nitrate pollution affects communities in Iowa ranging from the state's largest cities to "many of its smallest," says the Des Moines Register, "evidence of a contamination problem that reaches across the state."

Global fertilizer usage is on track to top 200 million tonnes in 2018, up 25 percent in a decade, says the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. In a report, FAO says fertilizer consumption is forecast to rise by 1.8 percent a year through 2018.

The trio of practices known as Conservation Agriculture can boost yields in sub-Saharan Africa, says a meta-analysis of 41 studies, but researchers say it may not be a blanket answer. Some 930 million people live in sub-Saharan Africa and two-thirds of them rely on small farms for their livelihoods. Over-grazing, fragile soils and growing aridity are among the problems facing the region.

Farmers could see greater financial rewards by focusing on production costs than expanding the amount of land they operate, according to data from farms across Illinois, say three U-Illinois economists. Brandy Krapf, Dwight Raab and Bradley Zwilling compared the per-acre cost of seed, fertilizer, pesticides, equipment, fuel and utilities for three categories of farms - one group was 1,200-2,000 acres, another was 2,000-3,000 acres and the third was over 3,000 acres.

Over-application of nitrogen fertilizer results in a larger than previously estimated release of nitrous oxide, one of three major greenhouse gases, says research by Michigan State University appearing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Payments totaling $235 million are being issued this week to producers hit by natural disasters, including Hurricane Milton in Florida, said the Agriculture Department. The payments make up the bulk of $375 million in spending announced for various USDA programs on Wednesday.