Calls for an outright ban on the sale of ammonium nitrate are over-the-top, says the Canadian Fertilizer Institute.
Current practices and proposed new government regulations will make it difficult for potential terrorists to get their hands on the dangerous farm chemical, said institute spokesperson Susan Sykes.
While there have been media reports and other rumblings of a widespread ban of the nitrogen fertilizer, the institute has yet to hear any direct request for cessation of sales.
And the institute’s members have no intention of voluntarily yanking the product that was allegedly going to be used recently by the suspected terrorists to make bombs to blow up high-profile Canadian landmarks.
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“We really feel that the product is still valued by farmers,” said Sykes.
But western Canadian farmers say there is already what amounts to a defacto ban on the product in their region of the country, where it is impossible to find bulk quantities of the 34-0-0 granular nitrogen fertilizer.
Mike Mueller, a cattle rancher from Drayton Valley, Alta., said he can’t get his hands on a product he used as recently as one year ago to top-dress his pasture and hay land.
“This was one of the best products that we ever had,” he said.
In 2005, Simplot Canada Ltd. and Agrium, the two Canadian manufacturers of fertilizer-grade ammonium nitrate, announced they were no longer making the product due to pressure from governments, insurers and corporate shareholders who feared it could be combined with fuel to make the kind of explosive used in the 1995 bombing of a federal government building in Oklahoma City. That event killed 168 people.
While the chemical is still being imported from the United States by fruit and vegetable growers in Eastern Canada, sales in the West have pretty much dried up, accounting for only 8,000 of the 150,000 tonnes purchased annually in Canada.
Mueller said that is a shame because when he used the 34-0-0 product, the nitrate was immediately available to the plants unlike urea, which is converted into nitrate in the ground.
“I pretty much have nothing I can use anymore,” said the frustrated grower.
“I used it for many years as most of us did out here and boy I’ll tell you, if you missed a strip in the field you could see it.”
He can’t understand why farmers are once again being treated as second class citizens.
“Because there’s one or two bad apples out there, the rest of us have to suffer?”
Mueller said the loss of the “exceptional product” is just one more disappointment in an industry besieged by the BSE crisis, low commodity prices and dismal farm incomes.
“One of these days something is going to push me over the edge and I’m having an auction sale and I’m going to quit and people can go buy their food wherever they friggin’ want. It’s not going to be from me,” he said.
Others are not quite so despondent about the loss of the fertilizer, which was also used to top-dress winter cereals and dry beans.
Manitoba special crops specialist Bruce Brolley said bean growers in his province used the product as a mid-season top-up for their crops but he doesn’t believe those farmers will miss it too much.
“There was a lot of reluctance to use it because it was a more expensive product,” said Brolley.
