Fertizona - Growing Smarter
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Fertizona is Arizona’s largest ag fertilizer and crop protection retailer. With 10 locations located from Southern California, throughout Arizona and Northern Mexico, with a regional trucking depot.
Fertizona and its member companies, Compton Ag Services and Ag Express, provide inputs for Southwestern growers, turf managers, nurseries, landscapers, and municipalities. With an experienced staff of Pest Control Advisors, Agronomists and Turf Managers, we provide superior service and knowledge and provide for our Southwestern agriculture.
There’s an interesting new trend in agricultural fertilizer efficiency: controlled-release nitrogen. Already very popular with nurseries, golf courses and landscape professionals, controlled-release fertilizer products offer farmers a wide range of benefits.
As their name describes, controlled-release fertilizers deliver nutrition to the soil at a gradual rate over an extended period of time. The slow, steady release delivers nitrogen and other nutrients to plant roots to match a crop’s ongoing growth demands.
“Turf & ornamentals industries have used these controlled-release products for years,” says Craig Allen, Manager, Fertizona – Fennemore. “They know it’s a more efficient nutrient delivery system. Now as the trend moves over into agriculture, we have an educational opportunity to introduce growers to those benefits.”
Controlled-release (also called “slow-release”) products rely on unique high-tech manufacturing to encapsulate tiny nitrogen granules inside a special coating. Once in the soil, the coated granules release their nutrients at different times—based on temperature, moisture, etc.—to keep feeding the plants for a long time. This technology can also be applied to liquid fertilizers.
In addition to providing more efficient nutrition, controlled-release products minimize nitrogen runoff. When fertilizer in the soil isn’t absorbed by the plants’ roots, the nutrients often leach out or simply migrate from the target zone. That means you paid for fertilizer which isn’t being utilized.
Because controlled-release fertilizers keep working long after you apply them, they provide nutrients to your plants for several weeks or months. That extended feeding allows you to make fewer fertilizer applications in a season, which saves you money on both nitrogen and fuel.
“Some people shy away from controlled-release products at first when they see the price tag,” Allen says, “but you have to weigh the cost of one application of a long-lasting fertilizer against two or more applications of a traditional product. Controlled-release technology has the potential to save you money over the season,” he adds. “With proper research and discovery by Fertizona’s field men, we hope to have these new methods adopted into everyday practices.”
Fertizona and Compton Ag Services offer many kinds of controlled-release fertilizers, so stop by one of our locations.