Catch up over coffee
There’s a saying: “there’s an awful lot of coffee in Brazil”. But there’s also a lot of coffee in the world’s second largest coffee-producing nation: Vietnam. The Vietnamese coffee crop totals in the region of 1.2 million tons of coffee a year. However improving resource utilization has been made a major goal of the industry. Recent research assessing the use of polyhalite to improve yield and quality of coffee has revealed how to optimize fertilizer use.
Reinvigorate robusta
Over a third of the coffee plantations in the Lam Dong region of Vietnam are older Coffea robusta trees. Re-planting with newer, potentially more productive varieties is underway at a rapid pace. But target yields of the new, let alone the potential of the old, are unlikely to be realized without correcting the soil conditions and adopting good fertilizer practice.
Recent research compared current common, or traditional, fertilizer use (urea with a local blend of Ca, Mg and P) with the use of a locally available composite fertilizer (which included S but lacked Ca and Mg) and also with the use of the composite fertilizer plus polyhalite as Polysulphate. The research was carried out on a reddish brown soil at Bao Lam district and on a grey soil at Di Linh district.
Counting up the coffee
In both the districts of Lam Dong region, the use of composite fertilizer improved profitability. But the biggest improvement was seen in the plots where Polysulphate was used with the composite fertilizer.
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