The Importance Of Protected Urea

Photo: Thomas Ryan (Tirlán) with first year PhD Student Isabel Power and her supervisor, Dr. Edel Kelly (UCD).

The Importance of Protected Urea: Tirlán Sponsors Best Poster Competition at the UCD Symposium on Achieving Agricultural Climate Targets

By Isabel Power, Ph.D. Student, UCD

Tirlán recently addressed the UCD Symposium on “Achieving our Agricultural Climate Targets: Pathways for Success”, highlighting the progressive sustainability actions farm family suppliers are talking, through their participation in schemes including the ASSAP Programme, the Sustainable Farming Academy, Living Proof Future Farm Programme and the Sustainability Action Payment. Tirlán also sponsored an Academic Poster competition. The poster outlined my research on Protected Urea uptake in Ireland. Protected Urea is one of measures identified in the Teagasc Marginal Abatement Cost Curve (MACC), which outlines a range of measures that reduce Greenhouse Gas emissions on Irish farms.

What is Protected Urea? Protected Urea is Urea fertiliser that has been treated with a urease inhibitor, which greatly reduces the rate at which Urea converts to ammonium gas (Forrestal et al. 2020). This nitrogen fertiliser offers the largest emission mitigation potential out of all the MACC Measures.

While sales figures of Urea and Protected Urea have increased in 2022 (DAFM), the uptake for Protected Urea remains low on Irish farms. Adoption rates range between 2-7% for Livestock and Dairying Farms respectively. It is hoped that the number of Nitrogen Fertiliser users who adopt Protected Urea will increase in the coming years, given the following: • 30% of Ireland’s overall agricultural emissions are coming from nitrous oxide (N2O), the greenhouse gas (GHG) produced by

Nitrogen Fertiliser (Teagasc, 2022). • N2O is the most potent of all the agricultural greenhouse gases, being 268 times more potent than carbon dioxide (Teagasc, 2022). • Protected Urea has 71% lower nitrous oxide emissions than

CAN, and reduces Ammonia loss by 79%, compared with regular Urea (Teagasc). • Teagasc research shows that grassland treated with Protected

Urea do not have lower yields than those treated with CAN or regular Urea (Forrestal et al. 2020). Therefore, Protected Urea has significant potential in reducing Nitrous Oxide and Ammonia Emissions, without affecting yields, and is recommended by Teagasc as an alternative to CAN and straight Urea, given its lower emissions factors.

Increasing measure uptake

The Academic Poster research illustrates how farmers are adopting Protected Urea on a voluntary basis, indicating a willingness to adopt the measure.

Protected Urea acts as a direct substitute for the current N Fertiliser product (CAN), and requires no significant change to current management practice. Further, there is potential to encourage more derogation farms to switch to Protected Urea, to reduce their overall emissions. Ph.D. student Isabel Power will continue to look at adoption and acceptance rates of Teagasc’s MACC measures. Through this research, she aims to identify farmer preparedness to transition to these reduced-emission measures, as well as discovering the support farmers need to make these changes.