Fertiliser is one of the biggest costs on livestock farms and will always be up there with purchased feed and contractor charges as one of the big 3 cost items each year. Because of this, many farmers become fixated on the price/tonne they are paying and sometimes they fail to focus on finding the optimum combination of products to best fit the specific requirements of their farm.

A farmer could save from €150-€250 by shopping around for a full truck load but this is dwarfed by the loss of output foregone by failing to adequate fertilise sub-index or low pH ground or the waste and environmental damage incurred by applying unnecessary P. or K. where it isn’t required.

For an even more relevant financial perspective, a dairy farmer with 100 cows producing say 6000 litres and allocating say 350kg fertiliser per cow will gain €6000 from a 1 cent increase in milk price but he will only gain €1750-2000 from an extreme drop of €50/tonne in the cost of all the fertiliser for the same farm. Dairy co-ops in particular divert a lot of farmer attention away from milk prices by making “attractive” spring fertiliser offers which sometimes also include extended credit but the figures above confirm that the price of milk and beef has multiple times the influence on farm income than any minor adjustments on the price of fertiliser or the terms offered for its payment.

Maximising your production of home-grown forage is the surest way to increase the profitability of your farm. However, most grassland farms are still a long way from achieving this simply because their soil fertility is inadequate. The most recent full year soil fertility results from Teagasc in 2018 indicate that while they show significant improvements over the past 5 years, over 80% of all dairy farms are not deemed to have adequate lime, phosphorous (P.) or potash (K) and this figure increases to nearly 90% for drystock farms. Thankfully the picture for lime status or soil pH has improved at a quicker pace, so that the most recent results indicate that nearly 60% of dairy farms and 43% of drystock farms are adequately limed. Check out results from your own county by on www. teagasc soil fertility results.

You should test your whole farm every 3-5 years and more often than this if you are taking off large quantities of forage and especially if zero grazing. Doing a representative soil test is a simple task on virtually all farms and the very reasonable cost involved will give you all the information you need to put an effective fertiliser plan in place to address the deficiencies identified. Buying fertiliser without this basic information is like driving in the dark without headlights as more often than not, the wrong combination of nutrients is applied which will compromise your efforts to grow more forage. Equally important, it is a waste of your money and is seriously damaging to the environment. Teagasc have published simple guidelines on how to do test your farm (search “Teagasc Soil services”) and if you prefer to delegate it, they have experienced technicians to do it for you.

The traditional practice of spreading more or less similar compounds from one year without recourse to soil testing or the forms of Nitrogen being applied are drawing sharply to a close and rightly so. Nitrogen in particular is more likely to be applied excessively, especially when soil P., K. and lime status is inadequate and more recently the chemical form of applied N. being applied is coming sharply into focus because of losses to both ground water due to leaching and the atmosphere through volatilization. CAN is much more susceptible to both vocalisation and leaching losses than Urea and longer term, it’s position in the product mix will be under closer scrutiny and is likely to be penalised by levies over time.

The Irish Government’s Climate Action Plan aims to replace 50% of the straight CAN used on Irish grasslands with protected urea. This gives farmers a cost-effective option to reduce Green House Gas (GHG) emissions without reducing production. Protected urea is urea fertiliser treated with a urease inhibitor, making urea safe from ammonia-N volatilisation loss which is the problem with ordinary urea. At present only three urease inhibitors are registered under the National or EU fertiliser regulations, namely NBPT and NBPT + NPPT which protect against losses due to volatilisation and 2 – NPT which provides dual protection against both volatilisation and leaching and this is the agent used in Alzon from Grassland Agro. See https://www.teagasc.ie/crops/soil–soil-fertility/

However, there are 2 other forms of protected urea available here that have haven’t been reviewed by Teagasc yet. The first of these is Nutrisphere, an organic acid polymer that has imparts similar protection to urea as NBPT and NBPT+NPPT. This is the form of protection employed by Gouldings in their GEN product range. Secondly, there is also a chemically bound combination of Carbamide (urea) and ammonium Nitrogen, together with water soluble Sulphur. This product is commercially available as Piamon from Grassland Agro. An added attraction provided by these latter 2 modes of protection is their compatibility with conventional phosphates, so that they can be used to make very effective N,P,K blends that include higher levels of N. than conventional 27-2.5-5 or 24-2.5-10 and they also contain sufficient additional S and sodium (Na) at no additional cost.
Depending on the protection agent used, protecting urea will add 10-20% to the cost of regular urea and it doesn’t take much of an increase in soil uptake or a reduction in emissions to justify this premium.

Mid-West Farm Nutrition can provide you with the full range of fertilisers to address your specific fertiliser requirements and we will allocate all the time and expertise required to ensure that you get maximum return for the considerable annual outlay involved. We strongly urge all farmers who haven’t got recent soil text results to get them without any further delay and we will use them to provide a cost-effective fertiliser plan on sensible terms. Armed with the relevant information, we will provide the most cost-effective combination of products to match your specific requirements in the appropriate quantities own cash flow requirements and possible future price movements.

If your soil result prescribes a combination of nutrients that isn’t sensibly available from the wide range of products already available, we will be happy to source the combination you require in timely fashion if it is possible to do so.