Improving nitrogen efficiency in ruminant production

The most important nutrient affecting crop yield formation is nitrogen (N). Without nitrogen fertilization, the quantity and quality of food and fodder crops would not be sufficient to secure Finland's food supply. Since nitrogen also has harmful environmental effects, its use in production must be enhanced and the harm minimized.

Currently, most of the ammonia in mineral nitrogen fertilizers comes from Russia, so Finland is harmfully dependent on Russian fossil energy. The utilization rate of nitrogen in the final product in milk production is only 30% and in beef production 15%. However, in terms of many environmental impacts, Finnish cattle production is reasonable compared to foreign production. Despite of this, it is important to improve N utilization due to both ecological and economical effects. It is also important to create fact-based discussions in community about the measures aimed for improving N utilization and environmental effects of cattle production. This is one of the central goals of the N-Teho project.

The utilization of nitrogen can be improved by several means (e.g. consideration of N release from livestock manure, use of grass legumes, optimization of crude protein in the cattle diet, optimizing of peatland N fertilization), which together would reduce costs by approx. 40 - 90 M€/year. N-Teho studies the use of nitrogen under the conditions of a real farm grass cultivation. This is essential because several soil and growth processes - e.g. greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) and the release of nitrogen from organic form - are connected to long-term use of manure or slurry.

N-Teho, financed from MMM's Makera funds, is part of a consortium of three projects. N-Fiksu and Valkuaisviisas belong to the same entity as N-Teho. Together, these projects cover the critical parts of the nitrogen cycle and the modeling of the whole. N-Teho's part of the consortium is improving the nitrogen utilization of slurry, determining the GHG emissions of slurry use and part of the modeling and communication. N-Fiksu and Valkuaisviisas are responsible for e.g. on specifying the nitrogen fertilization of peat lands, increasing clover cultivation, determining the nitrogen leaching of the most important feed plants and optimizing the feed protein content of dairy cows. These projects are supported by regional funding. The projects complement each other in terms of the nitrogen model and communication.

N-Teho has been designed together with essential companies in the field and they also finance the consortium. The results of the projects are put into practice through multiple channels: reciprocal communication with farm entrepreneurs is carried out in small groups, and in addition, the cooperating companies have direct contact with contract farms and pilot farms and excellent tools for information transfer. The transparency of cattle production and the social discussion in community are increased by means of communication. Here, the new approach is the conciliatory journalistic method, through which the project organizes e.g. workshops related to communication.