Fertilization is one of the most important field operation in arable farming. Fertilization is a cost relevant activity for growing crops and is an environmental risk. To minimize environmental risks and cost and to optimize yield, profitability and fertilizer use, sites-specific management is a new paradigm and farming concept that simultaneously enables optimal farm profitability and environmental sustainability. The chances of site-specific management practice are widely accepted by the farmer community and the technical preconditions are available on the market. But to be practically able to adapt precision fertilization farmers need to know the actual nutrient status of the cropland and to have a system available that is easy to be integrated into their work flows and is flexible for their ad-hoc and spontaneous decisions making due to changing weather and workforce handicaps. The system has to be reliable and cost efficient, allowing to document good farm practice. Today farmers still apply nutrients equally over entire fields but mostly consider the potential yield differences between the fields. Future optimization needs to consider the spatial pattern of the differences in nutrient status and nutrient demand within each individual field. When this is enabled then the variable rate technology (VRT) can be efficiently used to site-specifically adapt fertilizers to the actual demand of the crops for optimal yield formation and for minimized losses of nutrients.
With our Nutrient management and fertilization Expert service (N-eXpert) we support our customers with a dedicated decision making procedure regarding recent fertilization regulations. Our service enables farmers to achieve higher nutrient efficiency at lower yield risks, and to simultaneously reduce the environmental pollution with nutrients in groundwater, waterbodies, and atmosphere (N2O emissions).