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For almost 10 years, Nutrien has provided the eKonomics tools to help retailers and growers have conversations around optimizing their agronomic decisions, and now the desktop tools are expanded to be available on a mobile app.
The four calculator tools are:
- Nutrient Removal Calculator
- Nutrient ROI Calculator
- Growing Degree Days Calculator
- Rainfall Tracker
“This is about having a conversation to dial in agronomics and factor in the economics,” says Robert Mullen, Nutrien Director of Agronomy. “The tool shows the economic result of a decision, and it really fosters a better conversation between the farmer and their retailer.”
He says it’s important for return on investment to be the central theme of these conversations for economic, environmental, and efficiency reasons. And he’s seen how farmers are seeking out how to make more data-driven decisions.
“They are asking not just what they should be doing, but why they should be doing it,” he says.
Available for a broad range of crops, the Nutrient Removal Calculator uses yield goals as a baseline for estimating crop nutrient removal of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium for a range of crops.
Boasted to be the industry’s first of its kind, the Nutrient ROI Calculator uses university data to model phosphorus and potassium crop response. The tool uses spatial variation in calculating the economic return.
“This provides a simple way to quantify how nutrients are being removed,” Mullen says. “And we are releasing updates to the models every year as new data is made available—including how we expand all of the tools to more crops.
The other two tools are a Growing Degree Days Calculator and a Rainfall Tracker.
“For retailers, these tools can make an economic case for the products and solutions they provide to customers. The industry is comfortable talking through the agronomics of these decisions—this just adds in how it all comes back to dollars and cents,” Mullen says.
