Fertilisers

Transcript

Fertilisers give farmers a tool to be able to boost production when they need to. If too much fertiliser is used or fertiliser is used at the wrong time of year, then it’s possible for farms to lose that nitrogen fertiliser either leaching down through the soil profile, or it can be converted through to nitrogen gas – as one of them being a greenhouse gas – which is what nobody really wants because it represents a loss of productivity. You are losing nitrogen off your farm, but you are exporting that nitrogen somewhere else where it can also act as a fertiliser, like in streams or in waterways, and that’s where you’ll get unwanted growth.

Acknowledgements Mark Silcock, McDonald’s Lime Juliet Milne, Otago Regional Council Professor Louis Schipper, University of Waikato