Fertilizer application data sources

Regrow’s sourced fertilizer data is used as an input for field-level management practice applications and modeling/calculating emissions outcomes. Fertilizer application data is a direct input to both DNDC and IPCC emissions calculations for on-farm and up-stream emission factor reporting. We source and store nutrient application rates and the fertilizer product type (e.g., urea vs. UAN) from different sources to create a comprehensive data set at highest resolution and quality available to maximize field-level applicability.

Data sources

Primary data sources

CONUS: USDA–NASS Agricultural Chemical Use Program
USDA–NASS collects official statistics on chemical use (including fertilizer nutrients and products) via recurring surveys of farmers for major crops, estimating metrics like percent area treated, application rates, and totals. Coverage is crop-specific and reported annually/selected years, often summarized at national and sometimes state levels. Regrow uses state-level data first, and national data if needed as a fallback.

France: Agreste (Ministry of Agriculture statistics)
Agreste publishes agricultural practice and production statistics, including fertilizer practices (mineral N/P/K and organic fertilization) derived from structured surveys on cropping practices. Outputs are national or regional and typically annual or survey-year products.

UK: British Survey of Fertiliser Practice (BSFP)
Produced for UK government reporting, BSFP is a nationally representative annual farm survey that estimates average application rates of nutrients (notably N, P, K). Its resolution is typically national (Great Britain) by crop/land use, reported annually.

Ireland: Teagasc 
Teagasc’s National Farm Survey Fertiliser Dashboard summarizes fertilizer and lime use across Irish agriculture based on Ireland’s National Farm Survey, providing time-series insights on nutrient use. Its reporting is generally national-level, with annual coverage over multiple years from 2005-2024.

Poland, Romania, Germany, Hungary: IFASTAT 
IFASTAT is maintained by the International Fertilizer Association (IFA) Market Intelligence team and provides fertilizer statistics such as fertilizer use by crop. It's compiled from national reporting and industry/statistical sources. It is typically country-level and annual, sometimes with crop-level breakdowns depending on the module/source.
(Where needed, Regrow may supplement with the Dryad crop-by-country dataset described below.) 

Ukraine: UKRstat
Ukraine’s national statistical office publishes official tables and dashboards on fertilizer use for agricultural crops including applied amounts and/or application per hectare based on national statistical reporting. The coverage is typically annual, and can include crop-specific reporting depending on the table series.

Australia: GRDC National Variety Trials (NVT)
GRDC’s NVT program runs standardized crop trials across many sites; fertilizer inputs are set using agronomic budgeting and soil testing to meet trial needs, and the data are published as trial results. The granularity is trial-site level (not farm population averages), and is season/year specific based on each trial. 

Canada: provincial guides + industry surveys + Statistics Canada
Canada sources are a mix of public agronomy guidance and survey/statistical reporting:

• Statistics Canada publishes national agricultural survey outputs that can include fertilizer practice information, at national/provincial and annual/survey-year level.

• Fertilizer Canada Fertilizer Use Survey collects direct farm practice information on fertilizer management. It is survey based, reported for specific years/periods, typically summarized at regional/provincial scales.

• Ontario (OMAFRA) Agronomy Guide for Field Crops provides research-based nutrient management guidance and recommended practices; it is a provincial guidance document (not a measured survey), reported at provincial level. 

• Québec guidance (CRAAQ and Québec government resources) is used where applicable as a provincial guidance reference (generally based on Québec research and agronomic standards), intended for province-level recommendations rather than direct observation.

• Alberta government soil fertility guidance/tools (including AFFIRM and nutrient pages) provides recommendation frameworks and extension guidance based on agronomic research; it is province-level guidance, not field-measured survey data.

Secondary Data

NPKGRIDS (modeled gridded nutrient application rates)
Regrow uses NPKGRIDS as a high resolution, highly specific nitrogen application dataset as a primary fallback for fertilizer activity.     
NPKGRIDS is a global, crop-specific dataset of inorganic fertilizer application rates for N, P₂O₅, and K₂O for 173 crops, provided at 0.05° (~5.6 km) resolution for a time period around 2020. It is created using a data-fusion approach that combines global crop maps with multiple published fertilizer datasets and benchmarks totals against country-level statistics (e.g., FAO/IFA), making it a modeled best-estimate surface rather than a direct farm survey, available globally.

Global Crop-Specific Nitrogen Fertilization Dataset (used for fertilizer “type” when needed)
NPKGRIDS provides nutrient rates but does not provide detailed fertilizer product types (e.g., urea, ammonium nitrate). When fertilizer product type is needed in addition to application rates and nutrient use, Regrow supplements NPKGRIDS with a nutrient-rate information using a crop-specific nitrogen fertilization dataset that includes fertilizer types and placement, provided at 5-arc-min (~10 km) resolution across 1961–2020.

How the data is used

• If a primary country/region source exists for the crop and geography, Regrow uses it as the default fertilizer input.

• If a primary source is not available (or not available for a specific crop/region combination), Regrow uses NPKGRIDS as the global fallback for nutrient application rates (N, P₂O₅, K₂O).

• When a workflow requires fertilizer product type, Regrow combines NPKGRIDS nutrient rates with product-type information from the global crop-specific nitrogen fertilization dataset (because product type is not provided in the same way by NPKGRIDS).

Assumptions and limitations

• Primary sources vary in what they represent (surveyed farm practice vs. official statistics vs. agronomy guidance), so comparability across countries can vary.

• NPKGRIDS is a modeled “best estimate” built by combining multiple datasets; it is not a single uniform survey and may not reflect local sub-field variability everywhere.

• Fertilizer product-type assignment may be approximate where it relies on global product-type datasets, especially when mapping from crop groups to local fertilizer choices.