Development and Application of Coated Fertilizer in Japan

The fertilizer industry faces a continuing challenge to improve its products to increase the fertilizer use efficiency and to minimize any possible adverse environmental impact. For this purpose, studies on the development of coated fertilizers have been done all over the world. In this paper, we are to introduce our coated urea “MEISTER” as the sophisticated fertilizer, with explaining the features and applications in actual fields. “MEISTER” is the coated urea with a mixture of polyolefin and silicate mineral. “MEISTER” has two releasing types. One is the linear type. Another is the sigmoidal type. Release of nitrogen from “MEISTER” mainly depends on temperature which allows precise prediction of nutrient release. Application experiments for rice, Chinese cabbage and long onion are introduced in this paper. Every experiment shows single basal application is possible by using “MEISTER” with keeping yield and high nitrogen recovery. Coated fertilizers show accurate release control of nutrients. The use of coated fertilizers brings: (a) efficient use of fertilizer resources, (b) reduction of environmental load by fertilizer, (c) labor saving. Thus applying coated fertilizers is definitely smart fertilization technology in agriculture. Coated fertilizers seem to closely meet the requirements of an ideal fertilizer. The problem is its high price compared to the normal rapid soluble fertilizer. Unit price of coated fertilizer is expensive on the surface, though total application cost of coated fertilizers is often cheaper than the cost of rapid soluble fertilizers. This sometime disturbs the spread of coated fertilizers. So, we have been trying to make an effort to reduce production cost and doing application enlargement trials of coated fertilizers for becoming more widespread. Through those studies and development, we believe coated fertilizers will contribute to agriculture more in the world.