Alternative Fertilizer Options for Nepal - A Critical Review

Abstract

Food security in Nepal has been a challenge due to low productivity of agricultural crops. Access to fertilizer has been the bottleneck for increasing productivity in Nepalese agriculture. The ever increasing price for fertilizer and unreliable supply will put further pressure on Nepalese agriculture in the future. Therefore, an alternative fertilizer plan based on recovering fertilizer products from various agricultural and municipal organic wastes has been explored. Developing fertilizer products from a wide range of organic wastes has been a topic of interest world-wide, and recently there has been major progress on new methods of organic recycling. For example, Biotech Ltd has patented an aerobic thermophilic digestor technology that is in use for the rapid composting of various organic wastes with high fertilizer value. Rapid digestion of varied organic wastes, including poultry wastes, and their codigestion with other organic wastes (e.g., food, sludge, green waste) were evaluated to produce a wide range of composted products that can be further composted or to produce dry organic pallets, granules or to develop custom blends of fertilizer in an organo-mineral mix as a complete fertilizer suitable in different cropping industries. Palletization and dry organo-mineral fertilizer products have longer storage, are cost effective to transport and in land application. Innovation and practice change in the production of organo-mineral fertilizers complemented with best practice management in crop production, are expected to result in transformational gain of agriculture productivity and profitability in Nepal.