Even more ways to make farms thrive

Today’s climate crisis and resource challenges require complementary approaches to ensure the long-term productivity and sustainability of farms. We can help achieve this by supporting soil health, providing quality assurance and partnering with all farmers.

Here is what you need to know about organic-based fertilizers

Hand harvesting a carrot from a healthy soil

Supporting soil health

Together with our mineral fertilizers, our organic-based fertilizers support soil health and contribute to our mission to responsibly feed the world and protect the planet.

Organic-based fertilizers help contribute to a circular economy by using both nutrients already available on the farm and nutrients safely recycled from other sources, as fertilizing products. The organic matter of these fertilizers also helps support soil health and crop resilience, which are crucial in a changing climate.

Providing quality assurance

Farmer opening a bag of organic-base fertilizer

Our decades-long crop nutrition knowledge, combined with our innovative mindset, enables us to ensure nutrient use efficiency and quality assurance also in the organic sector.

Our organic-based fertilizers follow Yara’s high quality and safety standards for products and production processes, helping ensure enough high-quality organic-based fertilizers become available to meet demand.

Partnering with all farmers

Yara supports all farmers in implementing efficient, sustainable agricultural practices, regardless of which farming system they use. In fact, our crop nutrition solutions, deep agronomic knowledge and digital precision farming tools are relevant for all production systems, including organic farming.

Organic-based fertilizers and mineral fertilizers aren’t mutually exclusive. When using the right source, at the right rate and time and in the right place, both can improve farmers’ livelihoods, support soil health on the farm, protect the environment and, ultimately, help feed the world with safe and nutritious food.

Organic farming at a glance

World's agricultural land

Around 1.6% of the world’s agricultural land, or 74.9 million hectares, is organically managed

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Total organic area increase

In the EU, the total organic area rose to 15.9 million hectares in 2021 from 9.5 million hectares in 2012, an increase of 67%.

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Farm to Fork strategy

The EU ambition is to have at least 25% of its agricultural land under organic farming by 2030 compared with around 9% today

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Recycling nutrients into organic-based fertilizers

Yara is working to find optimal ways to produce high quality organic-based fertilizers, from nutrients that would otherwise end up as waste.

An example is the Nutrient Upcycling Alliance, a circular food economy initiative started in January 2019 by Yara and Veolia, a global leader in waste management and resource recovery. The Alliance has a pilot project in London looking at how food waste collected from the city can supply local farms with organo-mineral fertilizer, shifting farmers towards regenerative agriculture techniques. The aim is to demonstrate how a circular economy vision for food can be achieved at scale.

The role of organic-based fertilizers in climate change

Climate change and environmental degradation is impacting soil fertility and quality and making farming increasingly difficult. However, if we maintain or increase organic matter, we can support soil health and therefore crop production. Organic-based fertilizers are part of the solution: when applied to the soil, they help restore carbon to the soil.

In addition, by recovering and safely upgrading nutrients from waste back to agriculture, organic-based fertilizers also contribute to extending the use of virgin materials, and may help to reduce CO2 emissions, the primary drivers of climate change.

We need to produce more food, on the same amount of land, with less environmental impact. Therefore, it is important to optimize the productivity of all farming systems, including organic farming. This can be done by ensuring that the best crop nutrient management practices, as well as digital and decision-support tools for precision farming, are available to all farmers.