How to catastrophe proof fertilizers (C&EN) 

C&EN published an article on how companies are considering new ways to make fertilizer as inflation, disease, and war push prices to all-time highs. The war in Ukraine is highlighting that centralized nitrogen fertilizer production can be a problem. Countries without much access to natural gas are scrambling for alternatives. Brazil gets about 19 percent of the nitrogen fertilizer it uses from Russia, according to data compiled by IFPRI. A caravan of technicians from a state-owned agriculture organization in Brazil is now traversing the country to demonstrate how farmers can conserve fertilizer as a short-term solution. Charlotte Hebebrand, IFPRI communications director and former director general of the International Fertilizer Industry Association, says the fastest and easiest solution is to focus on fertilizer efficiency. In most cases, less than 50 percent of the nitrogen fertilizer applied to a crop is taken up by a plant. Conducting soil tests to monitor which nutrients a field needs can help farmers apply fertilizers more judiciously, according to Hebebrand. Farmers can also apply specialty fertilizers that use time-release mechanisms to increase efficiency. They are expensive, but as prices for conventional fertilizers rise, the gap is shrinking. “They have been used primarily in high-value crops, especially fruits, vegetables, ornamentals, and turf,” she says. “Perhaps this also provides an opportunity for those to be used more broadly.” The article also included a figure from IFPRI titled, “Russia and Belarus provide a significant amount of fertilizer to countries around the world.”