Why can microbial fertilizers lead the fertilizer industry in a new direction?
It cannot be denied that the application of chemical fertilizers played a very good role in promoting the increase of grain yields per unit area and ensuring the supply of agricultural products, solving the problem of feeding a growing population.
However, long-term excessive and unreasonable use of chemical fertilizers has left the arable land we depend on for survival "thinner the more it is fed," stripping it of its proper vitality, and at the same time bringing severe challenges to the ecological environment and the quality and safety of agricultural products. Today, traditional agriculture, which relies excessively on chemical inputs such as fertilizers, is hard to sustain.
Recently, at the "First China Bio-bacterial Fertilizer Innovation and Application Summit Forum" held in Baoding, Hebei, Li Jun, director of the Microbial Fertilizer and Edible Fungus Strain Quality Inspection Center of the Ministry of Agriculture, said that microorganisms are the breakthrough for solving the problem of sustainable agricultural development, and that microbial fertilizers will become a new direction leading the future development of the fertilizer industry, and an inevitable choice to support the sustainable development of China's agriculture.
"China feeds 22% of the world's population with 7% of the world's arable land." Behind this miracle is "intensive cultivation" on limited arable land. Because there are many people and little land, our arable land cannot be left fallow and rotated as in developed countries, and gets no chance to recuperate.
In order to ensure an effective supply of grain, starting in the 1970s, Chinese agriculture entered the era of chemical agriculture. At present, China is the world's largest producer and user of nitrogen fertilizer, with nitrogen fertilizer use accounting for 30% of the global total, and the fertilizer utilization rate is very low, with the utilization rate of nitrogen fertilizer only 35%; China's fertilizer use per unit area is twice that of developed countries, and the utilization rate is only about half that of the United States.
Li Jun said that due to long-term unreasonable use of chemical fertilizers, the vitality of the soil has been destroyed, leading to a decline in arable land productivity, and China's fertilizer returns have declined sharply: in 1975, each kilogram of fertilizer could produce 25 kilograms of grain, but by 2005, each kilogram of fertilizer could produce only 10 kilograms of grain, a decline of 50%-60% over 30 years.
Analyzing the reasons, Li Jun said that excessive and unreasonable use of chemical fertilizers (especially nitrogen fertilizer) has led to soil acidification, hardening, a decline in organic matter content, and an imbalance in the structural composition of functional microbial flora; combined with pesticide and herbicide residues, heavy metal and antibiotic pollution, and so on, the soil is overwhelmed. With the long-term use of large amounts of chemical inputs, the soil is in a "sub-healthy" state and has lost its vitality; unhealthy soil has also caused a decline in the quality of agricultural products.
With the advancement of China's urbanization process, arable land is decreasing year by year, water resources are severely short, arable land productivity is declining, and the ecological environment is deteriorating. How to ensure the sustainable development of agriculture in the future will be a major issue facing China.
With the improvement of people's living standards, people not only need to eat their fill, but also need to eat well. Today, safety "on the tip of the tongue" has become a hot topic of public concern. Li Jun believes that to protect people's health, the source is to protect the health of the soil. Microbial preparations and microbial fertilizers can eliminate toxic and harmful substances in the soil and decompose organic materials such as straw, and play an irreplaceable and unique role in enhancing soil vitality, protecting soil health, improving the quality of agricultural products, and promoting sustainable agricultural development.
Practice has proved that microbial fertilizers can increase crop yields, improve quality, enhance crop stress resistance, increase the utilization rate of chemical fertilizers, and improve soil activity, and other functions, and have attracted widespread attention around the world. American scientists have even proposed "using microorganisms to feed the world."
In recent years, China has attached great importance to the development of the bio-fertilizer industry. The "Bio-industry Development Plan" issued by the State Council positions biotechnology as one of the strategic emerging industries for future development, and bio-fertilizer is listed as one of the major biological products in the "Twelfth Five-Year" Biotechnology Development Plan issued by the Ministry of Science and Technology. In response to the prominent problems of excessive and inefficient fertilizer use and the year-by-year decline in arable land quality in China, with the main goals of reducing chemical fertilizer application and improving arable land quality, the industrialization of new and efficient bio-fertilizers is being carried out. To date, the state's follow-up projects supporting the industrialization of bio-fertilizers have reached nearly 1 billion yuan.
It is understood that at present, China's microbial fertilizers mainly fall into three categories, namely agricultural microbial inoculants, bio-organic fertilizers, and compound microbial fertilizers. The total number of microbial fertilizer enterprises in China is currently more than 950, with an annual output of 10 million tons and an annual output value of 15 billion yuan. As of June 2014, there were 2,015 products registered with the Ministry of Agriculture. In recent years, the annual application area of microbial fertilizers in China has exceeded 100 million mu, mostly on cash crops such as vegetables, fruit trees, Chinese medicinal materials, and sugarcane.
Compared with foreign countries, issues such as the research and development of new functional strains, scientific and reasonable processes, improvement of product quality, reduction of production costs, and stability of application effects are still urgent problems that China's microbial fertilizer industry needs to solve.
Li Jun believes that in the future, products such as organic material decomposition inoculants, soil remediation inoculants, rhizobium inoculants, and phosphate-solubilizing inoculants, as well as functional inoculants specially used for cash crops such as fruit trees and vegetables, bio-organic fertilizers, and drought-resistant inoculants, will become hot spots for research, development, and promotion.