Fixing atmospheric nitrogen is paying off for Yorkshire arable farmer Derek Cornforth, who has used biofertiliser Encera across his entire wheat and OSR area this season.
He trialled the product last year at the suggestion of ProCam agronomist, Danny Hatchett. Although Derek was a little sceptical, he is open to trying new approaches to old problems. “I need to be sure it works before I’ll adopt anything new on a field scale basis,” he says.
So, he established a small-scale tramline trial in a winter wheat field, applying two sachets across two tramlines (approximately eight hectares) in a field directly opposite the farm. The result was a yield uplift of close to 1.0 t /ha.
Danny explains. “Unlike granular or liquid sources of nitrogen, which must be absorbed by the plant via the roots or foliage, the nitrogen fixing endophyte bacteria in Encera live within the plant where they metabolise atmospheric nitrogen and turn it into an available form.
“This makes nitrogen available to the plant irrespective of the weather or soil conditions and negates the risk of nitrogen uptake being limited by excessively dry soil conditions or being leached away by wetter weather.”
Danny says the biofertilizer provides the equivalent of approximately 30 to 40kg of nitrogen per hectare, which means it can be used to replace a proportion of conventional fertiliser. “At a time when the ever-changing global geo-political situation is making input prices so volatile and products such as bagged fertiliser difficult to source, and with the incoming Nitrogen Fert Tax on the horizon, the ability to offset any fertiliser is welcome,” he concludes.
