German industry and agriculture collaborate on new ideas for efficiency
Tuesday, March 4, 2014
More pressure for increased sustainability, less waste and better profit margins is leading industry, academia and agriculture in Germany to co-operate on a series of pioneering crop management, livestock feed and fertilizer projects
by NORMAN DUNN
Three of the bigger breakthroughs in European farming lately come from closer co-operation between manufacturing or processing industries, farming and science. For instance, a market leader in farm equipment, John Deere, teams up with agrichemical giant BASF to develop and launch integrated solutions in precision cropping.
Right behind them, but in the livestock production world, Dutch research organization Wageningen UR and top Netherlands livestock feed producer Nutreco announce their latest research result: dairy cattle feeds that actively help to control milk fever (hypocalcaemia). On top of this, we see in recent months a leading German agricultural engineering university working with sewage treatment for more efficient use of this byproduct in crops.
The Deere/BASF co-operation is close in more ways than one – the European headquarters of the U.S. tractor maker and BASF HQ are only a few miles apart in southwest Germany – and discussions on how to amalgamate crop protection expertise from the chemical and the machinery sides have been ongoing for a number of years now.
Basically, BASF will be offering new customized crop monitoring and management support services on a farm-by-farm basis. Deere says it aims to incorporate all the resultant data for in-field management of new spraying equipment. Also helping here, the company says, will be a new dedicated Internet portal targeted at comprehensive integration of know-how and crop data. But it will be a while before crop growers will be able to get their hands on the respective machinery and software, cautions BASF. First tools for the new efficiencies are expected at the end of 2014.
On the other hand, special dairy cow feed to lower milk risk is already on sale in six different countries. Here, Wageningen animal nutritionist Javier Martin-Tereso had been battling with a problem that was getting worse with every new generation of high-production dairy cow. As every dairyman knows only too well, milk fever, due to severe lack of calcium supply in the cow metabolism at lactation start, knocks cows right off their feet. Emergency dosage of calcium gets them back on the go again, but appetite and milk production during the first weeks of lactation are both usually badly hit.
Milk fever, reckoned this university, was costing every Dutch dairy farmer the equivalent of C$300 per cow during the first decade of the new century. Special feed formulas for calvers offered more than enough calcium. But Dr. Martin-Tereso and the Wageningen researchers identified the problem as low-level absorbance by the cows, despite the feed. They postulated, correctly it turned out, that cows' metabolisms became used to low calcium requirement during late lactation and the subsequent dry period, and so failed to absorb more when demand peaked at calving.
How to kick-start a higher rate of absorption was the question. The Dutch nutritionists found that reducing available dietary calcium three or four weeks before calving stimulated uptake. Martin-Tereso didn't change the basic feed ingredients to achieve this, but simply added more of the compound phytase which binds calcium, so that it isn't available for absorption in the intestines.
More teamwork along these lines heralds a big possible change in the fertilizer world with more phosphorus from human sewage available for farming. The players in this case include the water treatment organization for Germany's capital city, Berlin Waterworks, and scientists from the Leibniz Institute for Agricultural Engineering in nearby Potsdam.
The laws controlling sewage byproduct application as fertilizer mean P cannot be simply separated out from sewage for spreading in fields. But a new process developed by the agricultural university and the Berlin Waterworks produces so-called MAP: magnesium-ammonia-phosphate. The magnesium binds the phosphorus so that it can be separated from constituents, including heavy metals and other contaminants, and this has been so successful that MAP has already been approved for use in German agriculture.
Its introduction onto the market by Berlin Waterworks means a finite fertilizer crucial for good crop production can now be recycled. In fact, the Leibniz Institute has proved that its MAP offers a better all-round fertilizer with the magnesium proportion at 12 per cent, a five per cent N content and P2O5 at 23 per cent.
Just like the Deere/BASF solution and the new Nutreco/Wageningen feed against milk fever, Berlin's recycling of its sewage as a valuable farm fertilizer not only offers exciting new possibilities for better sustainability and profit margins in farming. Each new project with industry and agriculture working closer together also greases the wheels for more co-operation so that the next problem will hopefully be solved all the quicker. BF
Norman Dunn writes about European agriculture from Germany.