Use of speciality fertilisers picking up as more farmers shift from cereals to fruits and veggies: Yara’s Sanjiv Kanwar

Crop nutrition major Yara International sees a pick-up in consumption of premium speciality fertilisers in India as more farmers move away from growing cereals to fruits and vegetables, to meet rising food demand amidst changing diet preferences.

From crops such as grapes and apples, the application of speciality grades of fertilisers is picking up in potatoes, onions and sugarcane, said Sanjiv Kanwar, Managing Director, Yara South Asia. The changing diet pattern is fuelling demand for more fruits and vegetables in the country.

“The use of speciality fertilisers is picking up with the increase in adoption of precision agriculture and the spread of drip irrigation systems. More precision farming is kicking in, with improved farm productivity,” Kanwar said.

The consumption of speciality fertilisers in the country, which stood at around 20,000 tonnes during 2012, has now increased to around 3 lakh tonnes. “We have a 30-35 per cent market share in the speciality segment,” Kanwar said.

Yara India is witnessing an annual growth of 15-20 per cent in its speciality fertilisers segment, while its urea business is growing at 2-3 per cent a year, Kanwar said.

In 2018, the Norwegian fertiliser major acquired the urea manufacturing unit of Tata Chemicals at Barbala in Uttar Pradesh, which helped expand its footprint to about 15 states from the earlier four, mainly in the northern part of the country, giving access to about 1,000 distributors and some 65 warehouses. Yara India produces around 1.3 million tonnes of urea and recently invested in making its production unit more energy efficient, Kanwar said.

“We are looking to the future with a lot of confidence that we can certainly grow our business much better and much faster ,” Kanwar said.

Yara is connected to farmers through different apps, providing them knowledge and other info, including a hyper local weather forecast, for which it has a tie-up with IBM.

Kanwar said the cost of producing 1 kg of grain in India has gone up significantly over the past 50-60 years. “One kg of NPK was used to produce 12 kg of grains during the 1960s. Now grain production is down to 5 kg for the same quantity of nutrient. So, unless we change our fertiliser application, and unless we bring in newer products, farm productivity is not going to improve, and that’s something we all need to look at,” he added.