The 2024 National Association of Farm Broadcasters Convention brought together agricultural communicators and industry leaders from across the country in November. Farm Broadcaster Corryn La Rue spoke with Chris Kluemke with Corteva AgriScience, to discuss upcoming news.
Q: Chris, exciting things coming down the pipeline to end out the year for 24 going into 25. You want to cover some of that for me?
CK: We just finishing up the 2024 season. And with nitrogen stabilizers, N-Serve is our product, and it’s been around for quite a while. But N-Serve is a product that we have to resell every year, and it’s a product that you can’t see work. And so we’re constantly doing trials and tests with that product to get the proven, reliable return that N-Serve brings to farmers.
Q: Remind me, you want to do a breakdown of how all that works?
CK: The way nitrogen stabilizers work, whenever we have nitrogen in the ammonium form, it’s positively charged. Soil’s negative.
So the ammonium attracts to the soil particle and doesn’t move around. Once we go through nitrification, it goes to nitrate, and nitrate is negatively charged, and soil is negative charged, so it doesn’t attract to the soil particle and it moves around in the soil. What we do with N-Serve and instinct NextGen is we slow that process down and we hold the nitrogen in the ammonium form much, much longer. Our research shows that we can reduce leaching by up to 16%.
Q: At 16%, how impactful is that for producers? Talk about what that means for them, and especially in a year like 2025 that we’re coming into, where margins could be a little tight for them.
CK: So we always encourage growers to stabilize any application of nitrogen that they’re making. And if you take that 16% and you do the math on how many tons of fertilizer we sell in North America and the amount of stabilizer we sell, that’s like saving 21 million pounds of nitrogen from going down the Mississippi and getting into the Gulf of Mexico. That’s a big deal.
Q: Absolutely. Especially in times like this where that is just such a key perspective for folks. Anything else that you like to include before we wrap up?
CK: If farmers wanting to learn more about nitrogen stabilizers, we ask them to run to nitrogenstabilizers.com or visit their local Corteva representative.