Barry Rogers thought there was no need to move a lot of soil to lay down fertilizer close to a plant’s roots.
So he developed a machine that blasts liquid fertilizer into the soil, creating “nests” of nutrients that can be applied anytime in the season.
Lined up alongside huge direct seeding machines and space age high-clearance sprayers, the small prototype of The Nester, as Rogers has dubbed the unit, looked unglamorous at a field day before the Western Canada Farm Progress Show in Regina in June.
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But the inventor says it could revolutionize the way farmers nourish their crops.
“What drew me to it was that you can put fertilizer on as the crop grows. That saves you fertilizer, plus you can nourish it more when you want it to grow the head or if you want to grow protein. You can time your applications,” said Rogers, president of Rogers Innovative Inc. in Saskatoon.
The Nester is like a sprayer. It has a pump, tank for liquid fertilizer, regulator and spray tips spaced 12 inches apart.
It can be mounted on a harrow drawbar or on a self-propelled sprayer.
The tips are mounted on steel runners that slide along the ground with almost no soil disturbance. The jets cut through standing stubble and trash and ride over rocks without damage.
The system pulses a jet of liquid at 5,000 p.s.i. into the soil about 18 times a second. Travelling at 12 m.p.h., that would put a nest of fertilizer every 12 inches, one to three inches deep.
Financial returns
Rogers sees the Nester as a risk management tool, saving money by not applying fertilizer when there is no moisture and applying it when there is the best chance of a direct financial benefit through higher yield or protein.
Also, fertilizer is not wasted because a nest has less surface area than a band.
“You lose less fertilizer because it is less exposed to the microbes in the soil. That’s why a nest works better than a band because there is so much fertilizer in the middle of the nest the microbes can’t hack it. They tend to live around the outside and you don’t have as much of your fertilizer exposed to microbes and the forces that create volatization.”
The concept has already been applied to a machine for the turf market.
Rogers, an agricultural engineer with a long history developing machinery with Agriculture Canada and private industry, now focuses most of his attention on developing sprayers and other equipment for the turf market.
His office is decorated with posters and photos of the golf courses around the world where he has sold his products.
He licensed the turf version of the Nester to John Deere, which has marketed it for a couple of years, but he retained the rights to the agricultural version. He now has several prototypes in the hands of farmers and dealers, gathering in-field performance data. He expects to produce a few dozen next year and get into serious manufacturing in 2000.
Rogers sees other applications for the technology such as injecting rhizobium into alfalfa. The rice industry could be a big market because fertilizer put in paddy water quickly breaks down. A machine that will put the nutrient into the ground is more stable, he said.
And even as Rogers started his first concept work on the injector in the 1980s, he had precision farming in mind.
“Back then everybody thought site-specific farming was only a few years away. Now, 10 years later, here it is.”
