Quantifying Adoption of Urea Deep Placement By Rice Growers in Bangladesh.

Quantifying Adoption of Urea Deep Placement by Rice Growers in Bangladesh

Experimentation conducted for more than ten years has demonstrated that use of Urea Deep Placement (UDP) results in significantly higher Nitrogen Use Efficiency (NUE) relative to conventional broadcasted prilled urea for lowland rice production in Bangladesh.  As a consequence, UDP use increases yields, reduces quantities of urea applied, increases farmers’ returns, and produces national savings due to reduction of urea imports.  Large scale adoption of UDP also has environmental benefits due to reduction of N losses and greenhouse gas emissions.

Assessing the degree of UDP adoption by rice growers in Bangladesh, and identifying factors affect adoption is critical to design strategies for improvements of the technology and expansion of UDP use in Bangladesh and other countries. The International Fertilizer Development Center (IFDC) using funds from USAID, as a component of Feed the Future, has been implementing the Accelerating Agriculture Productivity Improvement (AAPI) project in Bangladesh.  One of AAPI’s activities during 2014 was to design and implement a survey particular to each of the three rice growing seasons in the country –Boro, Aus, and Aman– to assess UDP adoption.  A household sample size was calculated employing probability sampling in a three stage cluster sampling.  Sample size was 840, 702 and 660 households for Aman 2013, Boro 2014, and Aus 2014 respectively.  The survey questionnaire was applied to each household in the sample.

Main survey findings about UDP adoption:

• UDP adoption for Aman 2013, Boro 2014 and Aus 2014 were 50%, 49% and 36% respectively.  Percentages of UDP users of 50% or lower evidence the large expansion potential.
• NUE increases relative to broadcasted urea were 45.6, 40.6, and 39.1 kg rice/kg N for Aman 2013, Boro 2014 and Aus 2014 respectively.
• Yield increases relative to broadcasted urea were 911, 861 and 393 kg/ha

Dominant constrictors:

 

• Additional labor, and the hardship for deep placing urea either by hand or with manual applicators.  Need for development of mechanized applicators and to improve manual applicators.
• Limited access to briquettes:  Need to increase briquette production and distribution.
• Relative high cost of briquettes, and there is not credit for briquettes.  The input supply credit market needs improvements.