WEYBURN, Sask. – Farmers who are banding their fertilizer and not at risk of excess fall moisture likely won’t find any advantages to using super urea on their spring wheat, one study has found.
Don Flaten, from the University of Manitoba’s soil science department, said companies are marketing distinct products like super urea to farmers for a couple of reasons.
One is to increase retail margins, because margins on bulk products are thin. The other is to capitalize on the concerns about greenhouse gases and the environment.
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Super urea contains inhibitors to slow down the conversion of urea to ammonium and nitrate. As this conversion takes place, gases are emitted into the air and contribute to greenhouse gases.
“Agriculture is the main emitter of nitrous oxide,” Flaten said, referring to the gas that is three times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas.
“If we’re going to get serious about climate change, then nitrous oxide is going to come under a lot of scrutiny,” he added.
Different rates of super urea and conventional fertilizer were applied in spring and fall on spring wheat fields at Indian Head, Sask., Brandon and Winnipeg.
All the products were deep banded.
The experiments conducted by the university, Agriculture Canada and the Indian Head Agricultural Research Foundation measured the grain yields and the gases coming off the fields.
Flatten said because the urea was deep banded, there was no ammonia loss to the air.
Nitrous oxide emissions were surprisingly low.
“In terms of nitrous oxide losses, greenhouse gases, we observed very, very low emissions of nitrous oxide across all our experiments, all six trials,” he said in an interview.
“And there was enough variability within these trials that we took a look at the amount of nitrous oxide coming off of our fertilized treatments compared to the unfertilized (and they) were actually very, very similar.”
He said this is good news for agriculture. It means there is neither an emission problem nor room to improve if even unfertilized fields are losing greenhouse gas at the same rate as fertilized fields.
“Fiddling around with your fertilizer technology isn’t going to give a whole lot of benefit that way,” he said.
The results may have been different if the fertilizer had been treated differently. Broadcasting is cheaper and could result in more emissions.
In terms of grain yield, four of the six trials showed slight improvement in yields from super urea.
“It wasn’t statistically significant and because these were situations where we didn’t end up with a lot of losses with the fall applied nitrogen anyway, the super urea and the conventional urea were remarkably similar in terms of performance,” Flaten said.
But factors that could affect those results include different weather, lower areas of fields or fall-planted crops like winter wheat.
Flaten said this was just one study and not the final word on what super urea may mean to farmers.
“In some way, shape or form they’ve got to return something to the farmers, whether it’s through greenhouse gas credits of some sort, or money in your pocket because of better yields,” he said.
“There’s got to be some incentive for the producer.”
Western Canadian farmers spend about $1.7 billion on fertilizer each year. That’s more than they spend on herbicide, insecticide, fungicide and pesticide combined, Flaten said.
