Bangladeshi entrepreneurs are ahead of the curve again. This time its innovations in agricultural development and production. The good news at issue is: using 40% less nitrogen fertiizer, farmers have increased rice yield by 20%.
And why is this a significant achievement? The NY Times blog Green Inc has some answers:
“Chemical fertilizers are critical to raising crop yields, but their cost has been prohibitive for many subsistence farmers, particularly those in Africa.”
“The inefficiency of fertilizer application is also a major problem. By some estimates, as much as 70 percent of nitrogen fertilizer applied to crops in developing nations is lost to runoff or released into the atmosphere, contributing to coastal “dead zones,” global warming, ozone layer depletion and other problems.”
Given these staggeringly difficult problems, along cames the following new way of applying nitrogen fertilizer to crops. “The new technology is fairly simple. Rather than applying urea, a nitrogen fertilizer, to the soil surface in tiny granules, the urea is compacted into briquettes and placed several inches below ground.”
“These briquettes release nitrogen slowly, dramatically reducing the amount of fertilizer washed away by rain or absorbed by the air. The technique has raised rice yields while limiting the amount of the nitrogen available to weeds, curbing herbicide use.”
The U.S. based NGO International Fertilizer Development Center helped put out these new nitrogen briquettes. There work could not have come sooner: while global commodities prices have risen, the price of chemical fertilizers has grown three-fold. Hence, not only is the new technology socially and ecological more efficient, it is also more cost-effective and as such, nearly 2 million acres of farming land are now employing the” urea deeply placement” technology. Indeed, more than a million enrollees are expected to join.
Finally, “the success in Bangladesh has generated interest internationally, particularly among nations in sub-Saharan Africa where fertilizer use has long been cost-prohibitive for subsistence farmers. So far, four delegations from Africa — with representatives from Malawi, Uganda, Nigeria, Togo, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Madagascar, Senegal, Rwanda, Burundi, Congo and Kenya — have visited Bangladeshi farms and briquette factories.”