Enhancing Phosphorus

This is Tim Hammerich of the Ag Information Network with your Farm of the Future Report.

Phosphorus is the second-largest nutrient used in food production worldwide, but it’s a challenge to make sure it all makes its way to the crop. There have been numerous efforts to try to approve nutrient efficiency in this area, but Phospholutions founder Hunter Swisher says they’ve had their limitations.

Swisher… “But the problem is, all the solutions that have come out in the market today are downstream. So they're all additional steps required to modify product to the retailer. It's asking the farmer to do something different, blending something different, coding something different. What's unique about our solution is that we actually target all the way upstream to the phosphate production level. We integrate our technology into the traditional conventional phosphate sources today. It's made the same way, shipped the same way, applied the same way by the farmer, but we just use less because of our technology being embedded into that granule that allows for phosphate a much higher percentage to get up into the plant and less of it to be tied up in the soil.”

Swisher says his company Phospholutions is able to improve phosphate efficiency and return more money to farmers.

Swisher… “The product is much higher in efficiency. What we end up seeing is that growers are applying less. We've shown that we can apply up to 50 percent less P2O5 per acre and still achieve the same or greater yield, ultimately saving the farmer money per acre to get the same productivity outcome. We do see some small incremental yield gains in our trials. So we're seeing that between the yield bushel increases and the cost savings benefit growers on average are taking home about 20 more an acre.”

Learn more at phospholutions.com.