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What persuades us to change our behaviour? Being asked? Told? No. Being shown a different way of doing things is most likely to attract our attention, keep us interested enough to remember it and then – when the time comes – to use what we have learned to do a task differently and better.
It’s the same with fertilizer practice. Farmers develop their own practices. They follow their forbears or their peers. They read or listen to experts, advisors or adverts. They do their own ‘look-see’ experiments and notice the difference that doing something differently makes, for better or worse. But few of these channels are as effective as trials that compare, side by side, how a farmer usually nourishes their crop with an alternative strategy.
One of the latest examples we’d like to share with you is from Indonesia, the third largest rice producer in the world. Indonesia has set a target of increasing the national harvest by 38% by 2040, and optimization of fertilizer use is seen a key step to achieving that.
This trial in West Java with two varieties of paddy rice, compared the usual farmer practice of using urea with NPK, with replacing the NPK with polyhalite, the natural multi-nutrient fertilizer that ICL FertilizerpluS supplies to farmers as Polysulphate.
In the control plot, the farmer added 250 kg urea at transplanting and 500 kg NPK (15-15-15) at 10 and 30 days after transplanting. In the Polysulphate-treated plots, 250 kg of urea was applied at transplanting and 150 kg of Polysulphate was applied at 20 and 35 days after transplanting.
The measurements of the rice harvest showed that using Polysulphate increased yields by 20%.
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