Just What the Industry Needed: Wide Window for Fall Applications

While the supply chain concerns for inputs in 2022 still weigh heavy, Jeff Tarsi of Nutrien Ag Solutions sees a silver lining in the current situation in how productive the fall application season turned out to be. 

“We've had an unseasonably warm fall, and we really got a lot of fall fieldwork done,” he told AgriTalk host Chip Flory. “We had a pretty decent supply of anhydrous ammonia–in both the US and Canada–and it was really critical to have a good fall application season with that and we had a very strong for potash and phosphate as well.”

He credits the successful fall application across its Nutrien Ag Solutions retail footprint for lessening the potential pressure of the upcoming spring season. 
Even though crop protection supplies are still an area for extra attention and planning, the crop fertility progress is a positive development overall. 

“Growers have responded well, knowing that supplies are tight and that we had to conditions that would allow us to get product applied,” he says. 

Other positive developments he notes regarding the supply chain are crop protection product production facilities that were at reduced capacities this past fall because of Hurricane Ida are now back online. 

Tarsi says if corn acres are between 92 and 94 million, he thinks the industry can cover that demand. 

“That doesn't mean we'll have all the product we want exactly when we want it. But I feel good from a Nutrien Ag Solutions standpoint and because the infrastructure that we have built and the capital we've invested in that it allows us to service our customers a lot quicker than maybe we could have just five years ago,” he says. 

Listen to his full interview here:

And compared to last year, when some shortages in crop protection were realized in March right before planting, the ag retail sector has been watching and preparing for the 2022 product demand since this past summer. 

“We really started in August planning with growers and talking about what crops they were going to plan so we could build our solutions around some of the constraints that we have,” he says. 

For example, Nutrien Ag Solutions is working with growers to switch glyphostate and glufosiante applications to post-emergence and positioning other chemistries for burndown and pre-emergence. 

A 13-year Shadow?

Flory asked Tarsi if the 2008 fertilizer market is casting a long shadow to how retailers are filling crop fertility supplies. 

“We're much bigger than a lot of retailers out there but that can be a negative as well because we don't have the luxury of just in time filling for our inventory needs. And so  we're actually we're buying fertilizer, for instance, we're buying it almost year round,” he says. “I'm one of those guys that I don't go to bed at night and not think about you know what happened in the fall of ’08 and in early 2009 and but in this business we understand what our risk or and in our in our job is to service that customer. That's what we try to do. We get up every morning with think about it today—even between Christmas and New Year's Eve–as what can we do better to make sure that this spring goes more smoothly.” 

He does note that UAN supplies for the east and west coast are still challenged because of curtailed imports.