A new online tool aims to help farmers maximise nutrient efficiency, reduce input costs and improve crop performance.
Launched by biologicals specialist Unium Bioscience, the suite of online nutrient decision-support tools, including Nitrogen Power and Potassium Power. It builds on the company’s existing Phosphate Power tool.
Together, the tools form an intuitive, free-to-use platform that allows farmers to assess the biological availability of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium (NPK) in their soils.
With a simple postcode entry, growers can access tailored, field-specific recommendations, generated by combining soil, weather and environmental data with peer-reviewed science.
“Nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium availability is often constrained by soil structure, pH, temperature, and moisture,” says John Haywood at Unium Bioscience. “Our tools help unlock those limitations by offering growers real-time, location-specific advice to make better-informed nutrition decisions.”
Optimising yields
Each nutrient tool is designed to guide practical on-farm decisions, whether it’s choosing the right seed treatments, foliar applications, or biostimulants to enhance root growth, nutrient uptake, and overall plant resilience.
Nutrient use efficiency (NUE) has become central to farming as growers look to get more output from every unit of fertiliser applied. With input costs high and margins tight, crops must be able to convert nutrients into yield.
Poor NUE means wasted fertiliser, higher costs and greater risk of losses to the environment through leaching or emissions. Improving NUE involves better timing, accurate rates, balanced nutrition and attention to soil health.
In practical terms, it allows farmers to maintain or even improve yields while reducing input spend and environmental impact — a combination that is increasingly important for both profitability and compliance.
Dual pressure
“Farmers today face the dual pressure of sustainability and performance,” says Mr Haywood. “With our NPK tools, we’re giving them a simple but powerful way to improve decision-making and get more from every hectare,.”
Rising nitrogen costs mean understanding what’s already available in the soil can help to make crucial savings. This tool allows farmers and agronomists to simply enter a postcode and crop type to see nitrogen bioavailability and volatilisation risk.
Using up to 150 days of climatic data, including temperature and rainfall, alongside soil type and crop uptake, it provides a reliable picture of in-season nitrogen availability, as well as current volatilisation levels based on weather conditions
Phosphate is classed as being limiting where the soil temperature is too cold or soil moisture is too low. Phosphate Power uses climatic and soil temperature information to calculate available soil phosphate.
The grower or agronomist enters their post code and will see a forecast of P bioavailability for the next seven days, with a simple traffic light system ranging from poor to good.
Seven-day forecast
Potassium Power predicts available potassium in a similar way to Phosphate Power. By entering a postcode and previous soil management, such as straw incorporation, growers and agronomists receive a seven-day forecast of potassium bioavailability.
The tool uses climatic data, soil moisture and texture, along with Cation Exchange Capacity (CEC), to assess potassium retention and availability to the crop.
“This suite of tools helps growers understand when and where nutrient limitations might occur, and how to act on them with the right product, at the right time. When conditions are suboptimal, early root establishment is everything.”
The newly launched Nitrogen Power and Potassium Power tools complement Phosphate Power, which was released in Autumn 2024 and widely adopted by farmers seeking a smarter approach to a nutrition strategy.
For full details about the suite of online nutrition tools, please visit www.uniumbioscience.com