Fertiliser costs face spasms of price hikes

Farmers facing rising fertiliser costs and possible shortages of major elements in the future have this week been told that, such is the world demand for fertiliser, price volatility may cause spasms of price hikes of up to £50 per tonne at any time and that they could expect steady increases in price.

But they were assured that ,while fertilisers made from non renewable resources will eventually run out, alternatives will be found and these will be far more efficient and less damaging to the environment.

Nuffield scholar Mark Tucker, the head of agronomy with the UK’s biggest fertiliser supplier Yara, told a conference at Harper Adams College in Newport in the English Midlands that economics would drive developments in the supply of nitrogenous fertilisers. His research also highlighted the existence of “dead zones” in the developed world where the balance of the natural nitrogen cycle has been upset to such an extent that it has killed off other plant life.

This environmental damage might, he suggested, have greater impact on future fossil fuel usage with them gradually being legislated out of existence.

He also believed plant breeding would improve the efficiency of uptake of nitrogen in plants in the future and while it may not be currently politically acceptable in Europe, genetic modification would produce plants that could fix nitrogen.

This he suggested could be less than a decade away but it would need investment to make it commercially available and it would result in fertiliser factories being found in individual plants as opposed to being in factories based the Middle East, Russia or China.

Another Nuffield scholar, Nik Johnson, a Lincolnshire farmer with a special interest in phosphates through his specialist fertiliser spreading company, JSE Systems, assured the audience that, despite concerns of shortages, the world was not going to run out of this essential element in the near future.

There were he said somewhere between 350 and 500 years supply available in the world, with Morocco holding two thirds of that total.

But he said farmers needed to be prepared for increased prices and increased price volatility as there would be increased mining and processing costs in the future.

He firmly believed farmers should operate on the basis of replacing the phosphates a crop takes out by applying the same level over a “rotational period”, which would be up to ten years.

The perfect phosphate balance, he stated, occurred when inputs equalled outputs and it provided the most efficient use of phosphates at the current time.

Another area where Johnson wanted to see UK farming develop was a system that unlocked phosphates that are currently locked up in soils.

This would come he suggested through breeding cultivars with better scavenging abilities.