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Fertilizers are expensive, so this year, I built a free online tool that’s helped me save 2,150 rupees on my farm in Maharashtra this year.
Now, if you’re a farmer then you purchase fertilizers every single year. And if you’re anything like me, then buying fertilizers is stressful. There are dozens of different products, all with different prices and all with different nutrient contents, and somehow you’re still supposed to find a combination of bags that is both cheap and has enough nutrients for your farm.
So this year I had enough, and I decided to solve this problem. Little did I know that this decision would require me to read hundreds of scientific papers, interview dozens of experts and generally spend weeks of my life thinking about fertilizers. But today, I’m proud to present to you the result of my work. I call it: the fertilizer magician and at the end of this article I'll share a link so that you can use it too!
Fertilizer Magician
So how does the fertilizer magician work now? The first thing I’ll do is open it up. All I need to do is take 5 minutes of my time to add three pieces of information.
In step 1, I add the size of my field in acres. I have a 6 acre field in Maharashtra, so I’m going to enter the number 6 here.
In step 2, I add the nutrient goal for my field. I recently calculated my nutrient goal for this season to be 121 kg of nitrogen, 15 kg phosphorus and 33 kilograms of potassium, so I add those numbers here. If you don’t have a nutrient goal yet, don’t worry! You can see my other video on nutrient targets here (https://youtu.be/eZIC8ZH5Jcs) to get a target for your field.
In step 3, I tell the fertilizer magician which fertilizers are available in my village. The magician starts out with a small group of default fertilizers: Urea, DAP, SSP and MOP. The prices for these are common prices, but you may need to adjust them. In my case I need to adjust the price for MOP because this fertilizer is a little bit more expensive in my location.
Then all I have to do is wait for a second and abracadabra!
In step 4, the fertilizer magician tells me the mathematically cheapest combination of the fertilizers you can buy to achieve the nutrient goal for your field. In my case it’s 2 bags of SSP, 3 bags of DAP, 13 bags of urea, and 4 bags of MOP for a total price of 13,385 rupees.
Pretty cool right?
How to improve your results by adding more products
Well it doesn’t stop there. The next step is really where it gets super interesting. I can now try to find cheaper fertilizer options by playing around with the fertilizer magician a little.
The first thing I’m going to do is add another fertilizer to the options. In my village, NPK 10-26-26 is sold at 1,100 INR per bag, so I add that by clicking on the plus button. The fertilizer magician now recalculates and abracadabra, it has a new recommendation. This recommendation uses NPK 10-26-26 and is able to get the same amount of nutrients for my field but at a price of only 11,860! That’s already 1,500 INR cheaper than before.
If you give the magician even more product and size options, then it can improve your costs even more. That’s even cooler right?
How to improve your results by moving the nutrient target
Well it doesn’t stop there. You can also play around a little bit with your nutrient targets. For example, if I change my nutrient target for potassium from 33 to 31, I get a totally new recommendation that saves me another 650 rupees, which brings my total savings up to 2150!
In this case, I am giving my plants a little bit less potassium, but my costs have gone down a lot! You obviously shouldn’t reduce your nutrient targets too much, but in my experience, a little bit of experimenting can sometimes reveal big savings, so it’s often worth trying!
Tips and Tricks
OK. That’s it for now. We learned about the fertilizer magician tool together and saw that it was able to reduce fertilizer costs on my farm by 2150 rupees while giving our plants all the nutrients they need! In the end, please remember the following:
The fertilizer magician can help you find the best fertilizer mix for your farm
You can help the magician by adding more product options and changing nutrient targets
If you want to access the fertilizer magician right now, then you can do that by downloading the Merry Farming app from the Google play store at the link below.
I personally created this app to help Indian farmers increase their farm profitability. It’s 100% free to use and super simple to set up! Once you’ve downloaded the app, all you need to do is select your language, navigate to the tools tab and scroll down until you find the fertilizer magician button.
If you have any questions or feedback on the video or the fertilizer magician, please leave a comment below. If you’re interested in more farming information, please like and subscribe to the channel. And lastly: if you have any friends that you think would like this video, please share it with them!
Merry farming!
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