What Are the Advantages of Agricultural Fertilizer？

This groundbreaking agricultural achievement significantly increased food production and has since played a key role in feeding half of the world’s population. 

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With the global population projected to reach 10 billion by , farmers must produce 70% more food than they did a decade ago. Given the limited availability of arable land, the solution lies in improving productivity on existing farmland—a challenge where the importance of fertilizer becomes indispensable. 

Meeting the demand of a growing global population 

As the global population expands, so does the demand for food. Fertilizers enable farmers to produce more crops on the same amount of land, helping meet the rising food requirements. Countries with low crop yields per hectare, if provided with the right tools and solutions, could play a significant role in securing global food supplies. 

In many low-income, smallholder farming communities, access to fertilizers can be transformative. With better productivity, smallholder farmers can increase their resilience, break the cycle of poverty, and contribute to the global food system in a sustainable way. 

Achieving food security means not only producing enough food but also ensuring that it is nutritious and accessible to everyone, regardless of where they live. 

Feeding plants, fueling health 

Fertilizers provide the essential nutrients—such as nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium (NPK)—that plants need for healthy growth. Without these nutrients, crops would fail to reach their full potential, resulting in reduced yields and diminished quality. 

The importance of fertilizer is evident in how it contributes to human health through biofortification. By enhancing plants with nutrients like calcium, zinc, and magnesium, fertilizers help improve the nutritional value of food, providing people with vital elements for healthy living. 

Yara offers a wide variety of fertilizers, including granulated products, powders, liquids, and suspensions. Each type is tailored to meet specific crop and soil requirements, optimizing yields while supporting regenerative agriculture practices. 

What are the benefits of using fertilizers? 

Fertilizers provide crucial benefits to both agriculture and the environment, such as: 

• Boosting food production: Fertilizers help increase crop yields per unit of land, allowing farmers to produce more food without needing to expand into new areas, thereby supporting efforts to prevent deforestation. This not only leads to greater food availability in markets, helping to feed a growing population, but also contributes to maintaining ecosystem stability.
• Supporting sustainability: By maintaining soil fertility over time, fertilizers ensure that soils remain productive and healthy, supporting long-term agricultural sustainability. This helps farmers continue to grow high-quality crops season after season without depleting the land.
• Improving profitability: By applying fertilizers using the 4R approach (right source, right rate, right time, and right place), farmers can maximize crop growth while minimizing waste. This efficient use of fertilizers reduces production costs per tonne of crop and results in more and better products to sell, ultimately enhancing farmers' profitability. 

“It’s a magical innovation (fertilizers) that’s responsible for saving millions of lives from hunger and lifting millions more out of poverty by boosting agricultural productivity.” 

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Bill Gates, from his GatesNotes blog post "Why I love fertilizer"

The importance of fertilizers in regenerative agriculture

In conclusion, fertilizers play a crucial role in enhancing agricultural productivity and ensuring food security. They provide essential nutrients that plants need for healthy growth, leading to increased crop yields and improved food quality.

A key challenge is boosting productivity while minimizing environmental impact. Mismanaged nutrient applications can harm ecosystems, leading to nutrient runoff and water pollution. However, when used responsibly, fertilizers contribute to agricultural systems that provide economic, environmental, and social benefits.

The use of chemical fertilizers was very favorable for a long time. In fact, according to the FAO, more than 40% of today’s population would not exist if such fertilizers had not been used. For example, the famine and population decline that North Korea suffered in the 20th century was due to the fact that its neighbor and ally, the USSR, stopped providing any kind of fertilizer.

As we can see, fertilizers are very necessary, especially today with the amount of people we are, we could not supply ourselves in any other way. Therefore, chemical fertilizers, being used in intensive agriculture, are the most popular. But it is important to bear in mind that a bad use of this type of fertilizer, or an excess of it, can cause severe problems in the long term.

What are chemical fertilizers?

They are those compounds made artificially from minerals and gasses, created through a chemical process, as their name indicates. On the one hand, there are simple fertilizers, those containing a single nutrient, such as nitrogen, potassium or phosphorus. They are used when only one nutrient is to be added or a higher concentration of another is required.

On the other hand, there are compound fertilizers, made up of several or all of the main nutrients, such as NPK fertilizers. These are used to obtain the best yields or to provide the soil with a better quality of life.

Advantages of chemical fertilizers

If chemical fertilizers are used, it is because of the multiple advantages obtained. These are:

• Quick solution to problems: as they act in the short term, this type of fertilizers are very useful in critical situations, when plants do not seem to be developing properly or when there is a shortage of food due to crop erosion.
• Soil adjustment: whether the soil has a very high or low acidity level, it can be adjusted with chemicals to get the most out of it.
• Increased productivity: the goal of using these chemicals is to get more, better and bigger food. With nitrogen or potassium, injected directly into the soil, you get the best vegetables.
• Low costs: compared to the other more natural options available, such as organic or bio fertilizers, chemical fertilizers have lower costs, but only when using those with only one main nutrient (compound fertilizers are more expensive).

Disadvantages of chemical fertilizers

It is mainly their excessive use that gives chemical fertilizers a bad reputation. The consecuentes of the overuse of chemicals are as follows:

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