According to numerous research studies, if you’re shallow banding urea fertilizer and you don’t get rain right away, the nitrogen losses to the atmosphere can be significant.
Experts say using a nitrogen stabilizer can pay handsomely, particularly in times like this when nitrogen fertilizer is expensive.
When placed in or on the soil, urea converts to ammonia gas. Then it needs to find a hydrogen molecule to convert to ammonium. In a shallow band, some of the ammonia gas escapes to the atmosphere. This is worse in soils with high pH, because they contain less available hydrogen.
Back in the 80s, it was proven that banding urea three or more inches deep resulted in minimal loses of nitrogen to the atmosphere. However, many producers using one-pass seeding systems today are banding much shallower than three inches. Banding deep takes more horsepower, burns more fuel and more quickly wears out soil openers.
One of the speakers at last week’s Convergence Conference in Regina organized by Aberhart Group was Craig Davidson, the co-founder and president of Taurus Ag. If you’re shallow banding, Davidson recommends a nitrogen stabilizer to cut volatilization losses.
"In the research that we've done with one of our newer pre-managed products, we've seen as much of the potential loss, we've seen as much as 93% of that being protected. So if you put on 100, your shallow band has potential loss of 15% or 15 pounds out of the 100. We would protect, call it, 14 of the 15 pounds that potentially could be lost. So you can greatly reduce that and say, of the 100 we applied then, we could still end up with 98 or 99 pounds of that for crop production."
While there’s a cost to using a stabilizer, Davidson says it can provide a strong return on investment. One of the barriers to using stabilizers is that they can result in a sticky fertilizer product that gums up seed drills.
"One of the challenges we still face to actually have that treatment done before you go to the field is the time for it to dry or cure into the urea. And that can vary on the temperature of the urea. If the urea is cold, it slows it down. If the urea is a little dustier, has more fines, you end up having the protectant or stabilizer coat that fines, and then that can build on augers and hoses and meters and you name it. And so, yeah, that still has been probably one of the biggest limitations to see the shallow banded market accept stabilization, and it's all logistics.
But in our world, we've tried to find solutions around that, just more logistical solutions. So that's where we launched in 2025, TSN, as a pre-managed product that actually had the curing process done well ahead of time before it makes it to the market with the idea that we just don't want to create those logistical handling issues that growers can't afford to have. So TSN for us is more meeting the market where they need to be on logistics to ensure that we can protect the nation that we know is definitely susceptible to a certain percentage of loss, even though there's dirt on top of it."
Davidson says nitrogen stabilizers are commonly used when urea is spread on the soil surface. Without rain soon after, the losses with surface spreading can be 30 to 50 per cent. However, the majority of urea is shallow banded during the seeding operation and that’s where stabilizer use is not common.
