Granular potassium fertilizer industry enters a fast track of development
For some time now, although the potassium fertilizer market has been sluggish, the business opportunities for granular potassium fertilizer have been steadily emerging. According to Zhang Weixing, deputy director of Shanghai Research Institute of Chemical Industry Co., Ltd., with the acceleration of land transfer, the continuous expansion of large-scale planting areas, and the constant improvement of mechanized fertilization in the planting industry, demand for granular potassium fertilizer has become a development trend, and the space in both the domestic market and the export market is growing larger and larger.
When powdered potassium fertilizer is applied directly in agriculture, it can be blown away by wind or leached from the soil by rain, and its fertilizer effect is released quickly, causing great waste. At present, domestic enterprises have also made certain breakthroughs in production technology: irregular granulation technology and round-granule granulation technology, as major industry technologies, have achieved major breakthroughs, the continuous granulation processes for related potassium fertilizer granulation additives have all been localized, and the number of granulation equipment and granulator manufacturers is constantly increasing. According to statistics, in 2016 China had 66 granular potassium fertilizer production enterprises, with total capacity reaching 5.58 million tons/year and total output of 2.82 million tons/year. Granular potassium fertilizer has a development history of more than 20 years in China. In particular, in recent years, due to multiple factors such as the acceleration of land transfer, the growing area of large-scale planting, the pressure from international production costs of grain and agricultural products, the high requirements of mechanized agricultural fertilization, and the diversification of granulation functions, granular potassium fertilizer has become an important development direction for the potassium fertilizer industry.
Industry experts also pointed out that for China's BB fertilizer industry to truly become bigger and stronger, it must move beyond the mistaken approach of simple blending and effectively solve three major problems in combining granular potassium fertilizer with BB fertilizer: First, adopt a model of separated promotion and control with fertilizer effect regulation. Nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, three different elements, are coated separately with three different coating liquids, thereby achieving the multiple effects of "controlled nitrogen for slow release, promoted phosphorus for increased efficiency, and potassium loss prevention." Second, combine the blending model with an integrated platform. Establish new diversified fertilizer-effect relay combinations to form new product types. This open structure can better adapt to the flexible and diverse changes in fertilizer nutrient requirements of soil testing and formula fertilization. Third, combine uniform particle size with mechanical fertilization. Segregation is the main problem in the production of blended fertilizers. At present, China's blended fertilizer production is mainly based on extrusion, and the granule shape is not regular enough. Blended fertilizer matched with spherical large-granule urea and ammonium phosphate is very prone to segregation, which is not only unsuitable for mechanized fertilization, but also affects the fertilizer effect of BB fertilizer, resulting in some farmers achieving good application results with the same BB fertilizer while others achieve very poor results. The reason is formula segregation, which leads to uneven fertilizer effect.