Originally published as a SOURCE story
Nitrogen fertilizer is essential for global food production, but more than half of what is applied to crops is often lost to the environment. These losses contribute to greenhouse gas emissions, water and air pollution, and broader ecosystem impacts.
Researchers at Colorado State University are part of a new international collaboration aimed at reducing agricultural emissions while maintaining crop productivity.
The initiative, known as the Agricultural Nitrogen Use Efficiency Platform, is hosted by Aarhus University and supported by the Novo Nordisk Foundation. AgNUE will bring together institutions across Europe and the United States to create the first international network dedicated to measuring and understanding how nitrogen moves through agricultural fields.
A key challenge is that existing models do not fully capture how nitrogen behaves under real-world field conditions, limiting researchers’ ability to design effective management strategies.
AgNUE will address this gap by establishing a network of highly monitored field sites, or “supersites,” where nitrogen inputs, transformations and losses are measured in detail across different climates, soils and farming systems. These data will be used to improve models that simulate nitrogen dynamics and inform both agricultural practices and policy decisions.
Stephen Ogle, professor in the Department of Ecosystem Science and Sustainability and senior research scientist at the Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory, emphasized the importance of this work for both farmers and the environment.
“Nitrogen fertilizer management is critical for enhancing crop production in modern agricultural systems, but can also lead to significant losses of nitrogen to the environment,” Ogle said. “AgNUE will provide a unique dataset measuring a suite of nitrogen losses across experimental fields in Europe and North America that can improve models and give farmers more accurate information about nitrogen management options.”
Reducing nitrogen losses can also help farmers save money by lowering fertilizer costs while sustaining yields and financial returns, Ogle said. Improved models could also give policymakers better information about potential interventions to support farmers and reduce the environmental impacts of nitrogen losses from soils.
Want to follow the project as it progresses? Follow AgNUE on LinkedIn.
