Switching to protected urea is currently one of the most effective methods at a farmer’s disposal to reduce on-farm emissions, a Teagasc researcher has said.

Speaking at a BASF seminar on nitrogen management on Thursday 27 February, Teagasc’s Dr David Wall said that while farmers do not have to use protected urea, it can have a big impact on decreasing on-farm emissions.

“The sector needs to reduce emissions, it has to do it somehow. Protection on urea and moving towards more urea, I’m not saying all urea, is certainly a solution in the tool box.

“Nobody is compelling anybody to take that tool out, but if we go into the tool box and rummage around for something else, there’s nothing to touch it at the moment in terms of getting a 10% reduction [in emissions] on a farm fairly easily by substituting one type of a product for another or changing the portfolio of products that are being used.

“I’m not saying we have to use all straight or protected urea, but certainly it’s an important tool,” he said.

Example

Dr Wall, based out of Teagasc Johnstown Castle, gave the real example of a farmer with 67 cows on 50ha. They are using 208kg N/ha, with 74% straight N and the rest made up of blends and compounds.

By switching to protected urea, there was an emissions decrease equivalent to reducing their herd size by seven cows or over 10% of their herd.

“If I was to put that in other words, if this farmer wanted to achieve that emissions reduction in another way, they would need to reduce their herd by 10% to get that emissions reduction.

“That’s fairly stark overall in terms of the choices here that we have to make of which technologies we take out of the tool box.

“I’m not saying a urease inhibitor is the only tool in the box, but if we don’t take this out, do the other tools in the box carry as much weight? And probably not.

“The next to it is low emissions slurry spreading (LESS), but it doesn’t come to the same magnitude here,” he added.

Weather

On the underperformance of urea in 2024, the Teagasc researcher said the impact of last year’s weather cannot be discounted.

“In the last year, a lot of the issues related to urea, some of it was fair enough and was real. Some of it was perceived, I would say and down to weather.

“Underperformance in the field is one thing, striping is a whole other thing. We need to divorce those two issues from one another.

“The weather factor and the loss of tonnes [of DM] in the second half of the year was a real phenomenon, irrespective of which product.

“There has been a growth in the area of protected urea and there have been a lot of newcomers to protected urea or urea, for that matter.

“That has probably manifested itself in terms of the only thing they changed in 2024 was they moved to urea or protected urea and they had an issue in terms of growth. That was one issue and reality that was out there, and urea or protected urea got the blame,” he said.