IFFCO has said farmer field trials were done over four seasons on 94 crops across 21 States since 2019. Trials were continued during Kharif 2021-22 too in all the agro-climatic regions. Various combinations of nitrogen that were made available to plants were evaluated and the resulting yield compared. Overall yields from applying nano urea increased average yield by 7% compared to traditional practices deployed by farmers. When tested in fields that employed organic farming practices (no chemical fertilizers, save the nano urea) the yields jumped 11%.

The Hindu reached out to IFFCO for comments but hasn’t received a response until publication.

One plant agronomist, who works for the Agriculture Ministry, told The Hindu that the process for approving a new fertilizer significantly depended on ICAR’s field observations. It usually tested a product on approved research stations for at least three crop seasons. In the case of nano-urea, this evaluation was only for a two crop seasons.

A senior scientist privy to trial results said that while the practice was to gather trial data over three seasons before forwarding a recommendation, IFFCO had already conducted well designed trials including in farmer fields and Krishi Vikas Kendra research stations. “While company has claimed yield increases of even 25%, we didn’t observe that. But we do see that urea is being saved,” he said. When asked why a season’s worth of data required was waived, “In our stations we saw some cases of yield increase by 3-8% but this wasn’t significant on its own as anything from rain or climate could influence results,” he added.

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