At the beginning of the agrarian year, BTU-CENTER is tackling probably the most vital issue of 2022: high prices for mineral fertilizers.
The first webinar in the traditional BTU-Center’s start-of-the-year series took place on Thursday, February 3
rdand united people from 15 countries. Scientists and agronomists of BTU-CENTER discussed how biologicals contribute to plants’ mineral nutrition.
“The price and availability of mineral fertilizers is this years’ primary concern for farmers” – says Dmytro Yakovenko, the Head of International Department at BTU-CENTER. “Market situation is quite complex: increase of gas priceб shortage of supply along with growing demand led to a significant increase of N-fertilizers cost of production. Fertilizers supply chain changes and no one knows what will happen to the industry this year. This is where biologicals come to help: we have collected a plenty of scientific and field data about the effect of biological fertilizers and gladly share it with farmers within a series of webinars”.
At the webinar, Volodymyr Krut, Senior microbiologist at the Institute of Applied Biotechnology, discussed the ability of bacteria to fix and solubilize important nutrients: nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium (NPK) and some others. Difficultly soluble mineral compounds are always present in soil either naturally or as a result of several years of mineral fertilizing. Plants cannot consume them as they are, but bacteria can. Azotobacter chroococcum, Paenibacillus polymyxa, Bacillus megatirum, Bacillus subtilis and other bacteria feed on these minerals and in the course of their activity transform them into different compounds, as well as phytohormones and aminoacids, which plants can consume in their turn and use for their growth and development.
Dmytro Chernenko and Oleksandr Ronsevych, agronomists of the BTU-CENTER’s international department, shared the company’s experience of the application with different crops and in different soil and climate conditions of microbial fertilizers Azotohelp and Groundfix.
Azotohelp contains Azotobacter chroococcum and can fix up to 60 kg/ha of nitrogen in soil (the average is 20 kg/ha). Groundfix contains a complex of bacteria that fix nitrogen, mobilize phosphorus and potassium and thus reduces the required rate of NPK fertilizers by 15-30%.
The agronomists not only discussed the products’ features and details of application, but also shared the expected economic effect of their use, answering the most vital farmers‘ questions: how much money exactly can biologicals save?
As in the previous years, all webinars in the series are hosted in two languages: in English and Russian, so that our partners and customers could choose their preferred language and make the most of it.
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