Reduce fertilizer use | Azotic Technologies says the product allows the plant to fix more of its own nitrogen
Canada has become a testing ground for a new nitrogen-fixing technology developed in the United Kingdom.
Azotic Technologies will soon commercialize a product developed at the University of Nottingham’s Centre for Crop Nitrogen Fixation based on a strain of nitrogen-fixing bacteria found in sugar cane.
The gluconacetobacter diazotrophicus bacteria lives on seeds until roots develop when applied as a seed coating through liquid inoculant or freeze-dried powder. It then works its way up the root system to colonize all of the plant’s cells.
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“Like rhizobia works on legumes, this works in any crop in the cells, fixing nitrogen,” said Peter Blezard, chief executive officer of Azotic, a technology company based in Chorley, England.
“It’s a game changer.”
The company says its N-Fix product can imbue any crop with legume-type nitrogen fixing powers.
The product performed well in labs and greenhouses and was tested this year in field trials in the United Kingdom and Canada.
Blezard said grass crops fixed 75 percent of their nitrogen in field trials, canola 50 percent and wheat 25 percent. He said it was a bad year for growing wheat in the United Kingdom, and researchers made the mistake of overdosing the seed with bacteria.
The company intends to conduct one more year of field trials before potentially launching the product commercially in 2015. It hopes to capture a portion of the global inoculant business, which is worth an estimated $286 million annually.
Azotic has granted North American distribution rights to Engage Agro, a company from Guelph, Ont., that markets crop protection and nutritional products. Engage is co-ordinating the Canadian field trials and product registration.
Blezard said N-Fix could vastly reduce a farmer’s fertilizer bill. The world’s growers spend an estimated $114 billion a year applying nitrogen fertilizer to wheat, corn, canola and rice. The company claims N-Fix can save up to 50 percent of nitrogen fertilizer use, which would have the side benefit of making farming more environmentally sustainable.
“Your government is paranoid about (nitrogen) runoff as is the U.S. government. We have an answer for it,” said Blezard.
Murray Hartman, a provincial oilseed specialist with Alberta Agriculture, said any product that reduces agriculture’s environmental footprint and lowers input costs is desirable. He said the early N-Fix results appear promising.
However, he warned that products seldom perform as well in the real world as they do in greenhouses and controlled field trials.
“We’ve had biologicals come and go before in different aspects of crop production, but they haven’t necessarily been consistent enough with their efficacy to be that useful versus their cost,” said Hartman.
Biologicals can lose some of their clout when exposed to competition in the soil.
Hartman also said the bacteria use energy from the plant to produce nitrogen, which can lead to reduced yields.
Blezard said that isn’t the case with N-Fix technology. He said the process is efficient and no energy is lost to the crop.
He said the company will use the field trial results to quantify how much nitrogen growers will save by using N-Fix on different crops, which will help it establish a price for the product.
Hartman said the goal in nitrogen fixation would be to create something like a canola crop that has root nodules similar to legume plants, which supply almost all of the plant’s nitrogen needs.
Seed technology companies have created plants that use nitrogen more efficiently, but he doesn’t know of any major company attempting to develop true nitrogen-fixing crops.
Some work on that front is being conducted at the John Innes Centre in the United Kingdom.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation recently gave the centre $9.8 million to develop corn lines that can sense nitrogen-fixing soil bacteria.
