Farmers are under a lot of pressure to manage their fertilizer better. From record high fertilizer prices in 2022 to growing public concern around nutrient runoff, you have to ensure you’re getting the most out of every nutrient applied to your farm. That means focusing on your nutrient use efficiency (NUE).
In simplest terms, NUE is the unit of a nutrient applied vs. unit of nutrient removed. It’s similar to how a car’s fuel efficiency is measured in miles per gallon. How much crop are you getting out of the fertilizer you applied?
Knowing your nutrient use efficiency, and making a plan to improve it, can help protect the future of your farm while improving your profitability.
What is Nutrient Use Efficiency?
Nutrient use efficiency refers to how effectively plants utilize available mineral nutrients. This can be measured as the yield produced per unit of input, such as fertilizer or nutrient content. Best management practices based on research form the basis of nutrient use efficiency. Despite this, it cannot be applied universally. Its success depends on factors such as crop type, soil conditions, weather, irrigation, and precision agriculture techniques employed on each farm.
Additionally, to optimize nutrient use for crops, farmers must rely on data-driven insights obtained from sources like soil sampling, historical yield and input maps, and weather data. Information like this helps to provide a comprehensive understanding of the farm operation.
How Does Nutrient Use Efficiency Affect the Crop?
Producers today must pay close attention to enhancing their soil fertilizer efficiency. The growing importance of focusing on plant uptake and utilization using enhanced efficiency fertilizer (EEF) technologies that limit nutrient loss to improve crop yields and quality has only grown more important over the years.
Unfortunately, nutrient use efficiency can be compromised as nutrients are lost in numerous ways. Soluble nutrients such as nitrates and potassium can be lost in runoff, drainage water, and leaching, reducing the overall nutrient use efficiency of your farming operation. Similarly, less soluble nutrients like phosphorus are more likely to be lost with sediment movement in eroding soils, further impacting nutrient use efficiency. By understanding and addressing these losses, you can improve nutrient use efficiency and better protect your farm’s productivity and profitability.
Whether it is used for phosphorus or nitrogen fertilizers, the research has found that soluble polymer technology is able to reduce the soil fixation of nutrients and keep more of them available for plants. This helps to reduce overall nutrient losses and optimize your return on investment.
Using that research as a foundation, one of the best ways to ensure your operation is running as effectively as possible is by creating a nutrient use efficiency plan.
Why Should I Care About Nutrient Use Efficiency?
The reality is, I think there’s going to be a day where people ask growers to show their work on nutrient use efficiency. Just like how you had to show your work in math class to get full credit, farmers will need to prove they’re being efficient with their fertilizer. It’s one thing to say your fertilizer management has improved over time; it’s another thing to show it. Nutrient use efficiency (NUE) is how you document that.
Part of the reason farmers will need to know their nutrient use efficiency is because of the statements the general public hears about fertilizer use. Statements like, “more nitrogen is being purchased in the U.S. today than at any other time in history.”
That is true. But the rate at which we’ve grown nitrogen purchases is nowhere near the same rate we’ve grown yield increases. We’ve increased our nitrogen use, but we’ve doubled our nitrogen efficiency. NUE gives context to those kinds of statements, helping demonstrate how nutrient use efficiency is improving alongside crop production.
Benefits of Nutrient Use Efficiency
Optimizing Nutrient Use Efficiency (NUE) is a proven strategy for boosting productivity, protecting the environment, and increasing crop yields. By making smarter nutrient management decisions, growers can maximize productivity while reducing waste, lowering costs, and minimizing environmental impact. With the right tools and strategies implemented, even small changes in NUE can directly impact the farm and the environment.
Enhanced Crop Performance and Sustainability
Better NUE means crops receive the right nutrients at the right time, leading to healthier plants, stronger root development, and increased resistance to stressors like drought and disease. When nutrients are delivered more efficiently, crops thrive. This level of care aids in a more uniform growth across the field for improved standability, better grain fill, and ultimately, more consistent yields. Improved NUE also promotes long-term soil fertility by preventing nutrient depletion and runoff. Over time, this helps maintain microbial activity, organic matter levels, and soil structure, all of which are key factors in resilient, high-performing soils.
Improved nutrient use efficiency also supports environmental stewardship, contributing to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and minimizing nitrogen leaching into waterways, ensuring compliance with sustainability standards and conservation efforts.
Financial Benefits of Nutrient Use Efficiency (NUE)
Beyond agronomic and environmental advantages, improving NUE translates directly into financial gains. When nutrient management directly aligns with crop needs, you’re likely to maximize returns and boost farm profitability.
- Increased Yield Potential Without Increased Input: A 2% improvement in nitrogen efficiency on 1,200 acres of corn can result in an extra 3.5 bushels per acre. At $4 per bushel, this means an additional $14 per acre in revenue.
- Reduced Fertilizer Costs: Using nitrogen more efficiently means applying less while maintaining or increasing yield. If nitrogen costs $1 per pound, saving 3.5 pounds per acre results in a $3.50 per acre cost reduction.
- Increased Profitability: The combined yield and cost savings lead to a $17.50 per acre gain, amounting to $21,000 in additional profit across 1,200 acres—without increasing fertilizer use.
As fertilizer prices fluctuate and crop prices shift, these financial benefits only become more pronounced, making nutrient use efficiency a high-value investment for any grower.
How to Measure and Manage Nutrient Use Efficiency (NUE)
Measuring nutrient use efficiency is the first step toward optimizing nutrient management and maximizing yield potential. While there are multiple ways to calculate nutrient use efficiency, the simplest method is to compare the amount of nutrient applied to the amount removed in the harvested crop.
For example, if you apply 200 pounds of nitrogen per acre and harvest 175 bushels of corn, your nitrogen efficiency is 87.5%. However, this is a retrospective measurement, providing insight into past performance rather than real-time adjustments. This type of data helps you identify nutrient efficiency trends over time and assess the return on your fertilizer investment.
To actively manage and improve NUE, start with precision soil sampling.
Precision Soil Sampling for Better NUE Management
Rather than sampling large field areas (e.g., 50-acre sections), focus on smaller, more precise zones (e.g., 5-acre sections). Higher-resolution soil data allows for more accurate nutrient assessments and better-informed fertilization strategies. By capturing variability at a finer scale, you can make more targeted decisions that improve nutrient use efficiency to reduce over-application.
Once baseline soil data is established, use in-season tools like:
- Crop modeling: A data-driven approach that uses crop growth stages and weather patterns to estimate nutrient requirements. These predictive models combine climate, soil, and crop data to help avoid yield loss from nutrient deficiencies.
- Tissue sampling: A diagnostic tool that evaluates nutrient levels within the plant during its growing season. This type of insight allows for timely, targeted adjustments to nutrient applications to improve accuracy and reduce waste.
Leveraging digital tools and variable-rate application technologies provides precise nutrient delivery to enable zone-specific modifications as the season progresses.
The key to effective nutrient use efficiency management is implementing a continuous feedback loop, where nutrient efficiency is regularly monitored and adjusted. This proactive approach ensures that every nutrient applied contributes directly to yield, reducing waste and maximizing return on investment.
Setting Goals for Improving Nutrient Use Efficiency
Once you’ve established a method for collecting and evaluating your nutrient use data, the next step is to set realistic and measurable goals for improvement. A practical target is to aim for a 5% improvement in nutrient use efficiency each year, which can lead to significant long-term gains. Even the slightest annual gains contribute to the long-term viability and profitability of your farm.
There are two primary approaches to enhancing nutrient use efficiency in agriculture:
- Reducing input while maintaining yield.
- Increasing output without increasing input.
However, boosting nutrient efficiency isn’t tied to a single change. Instead, every agronomic decision throughout the cropping year affects nutrient efficiency—from herbicides and tillage to irrigation, fungicides, planting dates, and population density. Each decision influences how well nutrients are used by the crop, impacting both its performance and efficiency. Nutrient management begins long before any fertilizer is applied.
Rather than focusing on a singular strategy or goal, prioritize NUE goals that best align with your entire production system. With this type of approach, consider involving benchmarking current nutrient performance, identifying areas with the greatest variability, or targeting specific nutrients that offer the most room for improvement.
While this might seem overwhelming, the key is to focus on making the best agronomic decision in every situation.
Choosing the Right Hybrids as an Example
Take corn hybrids as an example of building nutrient use efficiency naturally. Instead of selecting the highest-yielding hybrid from small-plot trials, choose hybrids that consistently rank among the top performers in your geography. These are more likely to deliver reliable results across your acres to maintain yield.
Then, work with your seed agronomist to evaluate:
- How hybrids perform under different nitrogen levels
- How they respond to fungicide applications
These insights directly inform nutrient management strategies and help you refine your approach year over year. By making better agronomic decisions, you naturally improve nutrient use efficiency—leading to higher efficiency, better yields, and greater profitability.
Developing Your Fertilizer Plan for Nutrient Use Efficiency
Now you’re ready to develop your fertilizer plan and work on your NUE. I recommend picking one nutrient at a time to try to improve, which for most growers will be nitrogen. It’s environmentally the most dynamic nutrient and often the third largest investment a grower makes, so it’s the one we can usually find the fastest economic payoff with.
Now we start to look at how we can manage that nutrient for better efficiency. With nitrogen, it could be adding a nitrogen stabilizer or changing the application timing.
Consider implementing a change based on the 4Rs fertilizer framework: applying the right nutrient source at the right rate, at the right time, and in the right place. According to Tom Bruulsema of the International Plant Nutrition Institute (IPNI), growers can increase NUE significantly by synchronizing nutrient availability with crop demand, which could be achieved with split applications, slow and controlled-release fertilizers, stabilizers and inhibitors.
The key is to implement and test one NUE-improving practice at a time. Once you’ve successfully integrated a new strategy, move on to the next. Nutrient use efficiency is a long-term commitment, not just a year-to-year adjustment. By consistently refining your approach, you’ll see sustained improvements in nutrient efficiency, crop performance, and overall farm profitability.
Addressing Nutrient Use Challenges with Innovative Solutions
For many growers, the biggest hurdle in improving nutrient use efficiency (NUE) is capacity constraints—whether it’s a lack of equipment, labor, or time to implement new nutrient management strategies. However, optimizing NUE doesn’t have to be overwhelming.
In fact, many farms already operate with limited resources. This is why adopting practical nutrient use efficiency strategies that are scalable and proven is essential.
At Verdesian Life Sciences, we develop innovative solutions designed specifically to enhance nutrient efficiency and help growers overcome these limitations. Our products are built to meet key NUE improvement goals, including:
- Inoculants – Boost a plant’s ability to fix its own nutrients and enhance symbiotic relationships with soil bacteria, leading to better nutrient uptake.
- Nitrogen stabilizers, phosphorus enhancers, and micronutrient solutions – Ensure applied nutrients stay available to crops longer, reducing loss and improving nutrient absorption efficiency.
- Biostimulants – Enhance plant health and increase yield potential without additional fertilizer, making each nutrient application more effective.
These technologies close efficiency gaps, increase productivity, and reduce nutrient loss, no matter the size or scale of your operation.
At Verdesian Life Sciences, every product we develop is focused on maximizing NUE. We’re committed to delivering science-backed solutions that improve nutrient use efficiency in both conventional and regenerative systems. Our mission is to help growers get the greatest return on their fertilizer investment—not just for the next season, but for the next decade and beyond.
Up Your Knowledge on Nutrient Use Efficiency
Knowing your nutrient use efficiency and actively working to improve it, even if it’s just a little bit every year, can better protect your farm’s future and profitability. If you’re ready to learn more about how you can improve your nutrient use efficiency, check out NUE University, our online learning platform designed to help those in agriculture learn about NUE practices and technology.