Omnigence Publishes New Research on Fertilizer Efficiency and North American Farmland

New Omnigence research compares fertilizer efficiency across four grain systems using 63 years of FAO data

CALGARY, AB, CANADA, November 4, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — Omnigence Asset Management (“Omnigence”) published new research examining how efficiently four major grain-producing countries convert synthetic fertilizer into cereal yield, and what that may mean for farmland exposure to input price volatility. The paper, Fertilizer Efficiency in Four Grain Systems: The North American Input Advantage, draws on 63 years of Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) data, from 1961 to 2023, covering the United States, Canada, Brazil and China.

The paper finds that North American grain production carries far less fertilizer per unit of output than the two largest intensification markets. Based on three-year averages to 2023, a tonne of grain carried about 13 kg of applied nutrient in the United States and 32 kg in Canada, compared with 53 kg in China and 62 kg in Brazil. On a per-hectare basis, Canadian and US growers work at roughly a third of the nutrient intensity of their Brazilian and Chinese counterparts.

The analysis also traces how each market has grown yields over time. The United States is the only one of the four producing more grain per kilogram of nutrient today than in 1961. Since 1980, US cereal yield has doubled while the application rate rose 14%, a pattern the paper attributes to genetics, seed placement, drainage and nutrient timing rather than higher fertilizer volumes. Brazil and China have followed a more input-intensive path. In China, the application rate has fallen 20% from its 2014 peak while yields rose a further 8%, suggesting a meaningful share of earlier application was adding little to output.

A further section places the four markets within a fourteen-country comparison and considers the implications for farmland investors. Fertilizer prices are influenced by natural gas and phosphate rock, and price increases in 2021 and 2022 illustrate the volatility of these inputs. Systems that use less applied nutrient per tonne of output may have lower direct exposure to fertilizer price shocks, although farm-level impacts vary.
“Fertilizer is one of the more volatile costs in grain production, and how much of it a farming system needs per tonne of output shapes how exposed that land is to a price shock,” said Stephen Johnston, a director of Omnigence. “This research is intended to give allocators a long-run, data-based view of how input efficiency differs across farmland markets.”

About Veripath
Veripath is a partner fund of Omnigence Asset Management, a $1.2 billion alternative investment platform. Veripath invests in Canadian farmland and manages a portfolio of more than 140,000 acres of row-crop farmland across Canada. Its investment strategy is focused on farmland’s potential to provide long-term value, portfolio diversification, inflation protection and exposure to growing global demand for food, feed, fuel and water.

About Omnigence
Omnigence is a Canadian alternative investment platform focused on farmland, operational private equity, and secondaries with partner funds managing over $1.2 billion. The firm targets fragmented, unfinancialized investment theses where scale, operational complexity, or size constraints limit participation from larger participants and therefore value is more compelling.

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Matt Barr
Omnigence Asset Management
+1 587-393-0893
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