Making the Fertilizer Industry R&D Driven

 Rejane Souza, SVP for Global Innovation,Yara International, in an interaction with Industry Outlook shares her views on the fertilizer industry’s approach to R&D and the various innovations that are  transforming it.

The global fertilizer market size is projected to be worth more than US$ 270  billion by 2030. How do you see the fertilizers market evolving in India? What are the major factors driving  its growth? 

The Indian market is one of the top three markets for fertilizers in the world. Therefore, it is one of the most important ones for Yara as well. What we see for the future is that this market is going to  evolve and grow significantly. Since a large population is  involved in agriculture, it is extremely important for the GDP of the country.

We have been seeing considerable effort being made to enhance farmers’ profitability, and the improvement in the quality of the food that is produced is extremely relevant as well. The market for fertilizers in India is still going to grow further when it comes to the more special products owing to fertigation, micronutrients, bioestimulants, completing a more balanced nutrition approach. Also, we see a need for optimizing the nutrition  because we must address the yield, and the need to ensure that the yield that we have is the most optimum possible. This action is connected to also increasing land use efficiency, decreasing the need for area expansion.

However, at the same time, we must do this in a way that the farmers get their return on investment. And we must achieve this with lower environmental footprint, what should not be seen as a competing priority, but a target to be achieved. Our predictions for the future of fertilizer market and agricultural marketing in India are very promising.

Being farmer centric means providing a positive experience throughout the customer journey into the company, supporting the farmer’s needs in a profitable and sustainable way. What is the best way to achieve this?

It is important to understand your customers. Thus, being farmer-centric means embracing the concept that one size does not fit all, normally. However, when it comes to agriculture, this is even truer. Therefore, I think that having in mind that the situations are going to be varying depending on the geography that you are in, depending on the technology level, and depending on the share of wallet that the farmer must invest is critical.

And hence it is important to help the farmers  understand that this is a journey. So, helping them with the step-by-step change is much more important than just trying to turn the key at once; because this is going to ensure sustainable change and evolution for coexistence. Therefore, being farmer-centric for us means understanding the reality of the farmers and understanding what we can do pragmatically and concretely to help them succeed.

Overuse of chemical fertilizers degrades the soil as it disrupts the acidity of soil which is detrimental to the crop and surroundings. What kind of innovative products can fertilizer manufacturing companies come up with to address these issues?

The most innovative products alone are never going to do the trick; you should also have the knowledge to properly get the best resource use efficiency possible. It is all about knowledge investment per hectare, and the higher the investment, the best the output and not necessarily, the higher the costs. We must ensure knowledge transfer and that farmers really apply what science has already proven, to harvest better yields. In terms of products, what we have when it comes to nitrogen, for example, we know that the biggest crop we have in India is rice. Considering this specific situation, ensuring that the crop receives the right amount of nutrient, according to its genetic potential in the right moment, during the growing season is of utmost importance.

However, approaching the crop as an integrated system and adding micronutrients such as Zn, macronutrients like Sulfur (highly demanded by the crop), can optimize the performance and there are products available for each specific stage, such as the ones in YaraVita portfolio. Another key point is to ensure crop resilience to constant climate challenges, so-called abiotic stress (e.g. drought, heat). A very efficient and innovative way of managing the risks is through bioestimulants, which will trigger plant's response to the stresses and help them to better cope with it, when coupled with a good crop nutrition plan.

But on the other hand, for  cash crops where nitrate-based solutions can be a huge breakthrough in order to support the farmers get more efficiency on the nutrients that they are applying, especially when coupled with critical elements like Calcium and Boron, since they are key to ensure good inner and outer quality, besides extended shelf-life, what is also intrinsically connected to reducing food losses, food waste by increasing marketable yield per unit of land. When it comes to a more balanced crop rotation concept, these are the results that we are getting from instances of micronutrients.

What is the fertilizer industry’s approach to R&D? What are the innovations coming up in the fertilizer industry?

R&D is a core part of what we do in global innovation today. And, we are dedicating time, resources and have a strong group of professionals covering a wide range of disciplines with deep expertise (+120 FTEs and a private research center in Germany), besides an experimental farm in Finland, experimental greenhouses in UK, The Netherlands and Brazil, ensuring representation of different growing conditions. Also worth saying that in our Research Center in Germany, we can simulate different climatic conditions with our climate chambers, what enables us to have research trials with tropical crops like banana, coffee in the heart of Europe. We also can measure GHG emissions and determine the environmental footprint of the crops, when using our solutions versus common practices.

We work with a holistic view when it comes to the crop production system, since each production environment represent a different set of requirements. We focus on what the crop needs, and what can we do to improve the yield quality and environmental footprint from the crop’s perspective, not losing the farmer centricity as the main dimension. Therefore, we are also focusing much on agronomic tools and recommendations. For instance, satellites, sensors, and all the remote sensing technology help you figure out the best moment to apply nutrients and the right quantity to be applied. Hence, we have been using a lot of satellite imagery, and sensors not only to check on the crops but also on the soil and environmental conditions to make better decisions.

Besides the hardware and tools, we are using data generated over 60+ years of research to create models to predict the future. How do you try to predict a situation before it happens? How do you help the farmers cope with upcoming situations? Or how do you predict for instance, what is the ideal yield or quality? And how do you trace back how to influence that? To know this, we have been investing a lot in analytics and modeling. We are working with artificial intelligence models, to teach some algorithms to come up with better recommendations to ensure that the output the farmers are having is exactly what they were expecting.

And on the other hand, we also work on new fertilizer products, in terms of understanding the role that microbes are going to have in crop nutrition for the future. How might they increase nutrient use efficiency? How do you also increase the soil health perspective not only by managing crop nutrition well, using fertilizers as a key tool instead of seeing as a hurdle? Fertilizers are one of the key management practices that we can have to increase soil health because organic matter depends also on the biomass that is produced.

Lastly, operate with more than 100 external partners that are universities, and research centers, because we also believe in the power of collaboration and co-creation. So, this is one of the approaches that we have in R&D as well and we plan to keep growing.