India Introduces First Nano Urea. Now, How Far is the Wider Scale Adoption of Nano Fertilizers?

IFFCO, Indian Farmers Fertiliser Cooperative Limited, has introduced its indigenously developed Nano Urea for the agricultural purpose very recently. IFFCO has gone public with its new product while the Indian government approving subsidies for Talchel Fertilizer Ltd. (TFL). TFL, a joint venture, is planning to produce 1.27 million tonnes of urea per annum, which could possibly trigger excessive use of conventional urea.

On Monday, May 31, 2021, key people of IFFCO gathered to introduces their nano Urea, the first of its kind among nano fertilizers, which is also a liquid fertilizer.

IFFCO claims that its nano Urea is capable of meeting the crop requirement in the best possible way rather than the conventional urea. It also assures that the product can increase the yield up to 8% while being environment-friendly.

IFFCO stated, its nano urea will be available to the farmers as 500 ml bottles soon. The plan is to produce around 320 million bottles per year in the third phase of production, stated IFFCO’s key person.

Compared to other chemical-based and organic-based fertilizers Urea is being largely consumed in India. The nation has over 30 urea production plants, out of which 27 uses gas-based feedstock. Collectively, the plants across the country produce around 24 million tonnes of Urea every year, yet the Indian government has been forced to import some more tonnes, China primarily.

Early reports suggest that the Indian government is about to set few more Urea production units within 2023 to achieve self-reliance to meet the urea need for its vast agriculture sector. Now, the IFFCO claims nano urea could cut the conventional Urea usage by 50%. Whatever, it depends upon its reach among the agricultural community of the nation, said the market participants of the IFFCO event.

IFFCO assures the trustability of its nano urea by citing its extensive field trials done on around 11,000 fields and 94 types of crops. Another, noticeable feature of this product is its price that is already 10% lesser than a bag of conventional urea.

The Indian government sets the price for Urea made in the country to maintain its affordability. The government keeps urea price intentionally low even though its production cost (for 1 metric tone) is almost double the cost of a tone of Urea itself. Hence, the urea production plants get the subsidy from the Indian government like yet another unavoidable financial burden.

Between all the trouble with excess urea production and usage, what betterment this nano urea could bring in is an intriguing question.

Nanotechnology in the field of Agriculture is currently in its embryonic stage, with only a few scientific studies to mention. But, scientists around the world believe that Nanotechnology is a progressive tool to bring sustainability to agriculture.

How Do Nano Fertilizers Work?

Despite the large-scale environmental damage caused by chemical fertilizers, the agriculture sectors around the globe rely on them to boost crop productivity to meet the never-ending food demand caused by the ever-increasing world population.

Apart from terrible hereditary mutations and health deteriorations, the worrying fact about conventional chemical fertilizers is they can only be used in large quantities to meet the crop requirement. They tend to release the nutrients and minerals rapidly despite the nutrient uptake capability of plants is limited. This commonly results in decreased nutrient-use efficiency of the crop.

The nutrient uptake ability of plants depends on the porosity of their root system. Undeniably, the root pores are minute. Hence, each plant should be given enough time to intake the nutrient and minerals broken down by the conventional fertilizers, which is hardly possible in this case.

Most of the time, the major quantity of the applied fertilizers end up leaching off the soil and somehow deposited in groundwater. The nano fertilizers on the other hand are minute in size that can be described as highly porous to the root system of the plants, which enhances the nutrient uptake and transportation.

How Better Are these Nano Fertilizers?

Nano fertilizers are made by finely grounding the raw materials to the size of which is considered nano, usually, they are 100,000 times smaller than a human hair. The nanomaterials are then involved in biochemical processes like encapsulating them in another nanomaterial for increased effectiveness.

Previous studies on nano fertilizers suggest they help in delivering nutrients to the plants without wastage and leaching. Their efficiency in penetrating through the plant channels that transport nutrients are astonishing. Nano fertilizers are found to be increasing the nutrient-use efficiency of the crop that resulted in increased crop productivity. Also, some previous studies suggest that nano fertilizers are reducing the time taken for seed germination and seed production of food crops.

There is hardly any fertilizer wastage happening in the case of nano-fertilizers because of their special controlled-release mechanisms. Nano-fertilizers release the necessary nutrients only when there arises a demand for that.

This is an excellent fertilizer management technique to reduce the overuse of chemicals in the soil. Nano fertilizers are chemicals too, after all. But they come with some advantages like they are small in size, increases the surface-to-volume ratio, and do no major damage to the environment.

Is wider Scale Adoption of Nano Fertilizers is possible?

Sustainability in food production is the need of the hour. At the same time, protecting the soil and its ecosystem must be taken into consideration. Turning to organic farming is a good move towards keeping the agriculture and environment toxic-free. But to attain food sustainability, the agriculture sector ought to consider some more alternative ways in contrast with conventional fertilizers.

Nano fertilizers may be a promising way to reduce the usage of chemical fertilizers. But presently, its usage has been greatly limited on behalf of various reasons such as lack of standard risk assessment, unaffordability, and not enough production to meet the wider scale adoption. Resolving the issues may pave a way for nano fertilizers to hit the commoners market with great affordability.

IFFCO nano urea, as an optional solution to prevent the over usage of largely used chemical nitrogen delivery agent urea, could a noticeable contribution to slow down soil pollution. But encouraging the wider scale adoption of nano fertilizers including nano urea seems to have its perplexity between current governmental policies and the trillion-dollar chemical fertilizer industries around the globe.

This article was first published by The Meister Journal on June 3, 2021.