Innovation in chemical fertilizer products driving industrial transformation and evolution

Theoretically, there are mainly two processes for developing new fertilizer products, one is to develop fertilizers with available nutrents, and the other is to exploit fertilizers with high-nutrient use efficiency. Guided by the theory of plant mineral nutrition, the process of developing fertilizer products with available nutrents has achieved the establishment of contemporary chemical fertilizer industry, with synthetic ammonia and wet-process phosphoric acid as its typical technology, which has made great contribution to world agricultural development and food security. The process of developing fertilizer products with high-nutrient use efficiency employs strategies of interdisciplinary, multi-tech integration and multi-way synergy to achieve multi-functions, high efficiency of the products to attain optimum yield increase and environmental sustainability. The evolution of chemical fertilizer products has driven the transformation and upgrading of the chemical fertilizer industry from 1) the primary stage of chemical fertilizer (the 1.0 era of chemical fertilizer industry) into 2) the low concentration chemical fertilizer stage (the 2.0 era of chemical fertilizer industry) and into 3) the high concentration chemical fertilizer stage (the 3.0 era of chemical fertilizer industry), and then 4) the efficient and sustainable chemical fertilizer stage (the 4.0 era of chemical fertilizer industry) which will arrive in the future.