The broader impact/commercial potential of this PFI project will be increasing the economic competitiveness of the U.S. by increasing the output from commercial farms and increasing the production of related industries that rely on agricultural crops. This project will result in a new fertilizer that can be used to increase the harvest yields of soybeans and corn by at least 10% and possibly up to 25%. An increase in yields per acre will allow over 500,000 farmers to grow and sell more food from their land and to turn unprofitable years into profitable ones. This will bring more money into rural communities and increase the economic competitiveness of America?s farmer. Increasing agricultural production affects more than farmers, it also affects industries worth $992B that rely on food production. This proposal targets corn and soybeans because they are grown on approximately 180M acres in the U.S. (this is larger than the size of Texas) and generate over $92B in revenue each year. Finally, this project will increase the food safety of the U.S. by increasing the amount of food grown on land already dedicated to farming.
The proposed project is the optimization and demonstration of a new fertilizer to increase the harvest yields of corn and soybeans. This novel fertilizer will be fabricated from natural chemicals and biocompatible, biodegradable polymers already used in agriculture. The formulation of the proposed novel fertilizer will be optimized and tested each year by growing crops of soybeans and corn in commercial fields and investigating the effect on yield of different loadings of fertilizer. The industrial partner will spread the proposed fertilizer using commercial farming equipment and grow corn and soybean plants under identical conditions as farmers. These studies are designed to assess whether the proposed fertilizer will increase the harvest yields and provide necessary data that will be provided to the Iowa Department of Agriculture to gain permission to sell the fertilizer commercially. At the completion of this grant the proposed fertilizer will be optimized for corn and soybeans and, hopefully, demonstrated to increase their harvest yields by 10 to 25%.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
