Delayed Differentiation in Fertilizer Production: Deciphering Climate-Smart Miscible Products through Reverse Blending for Boosting Crop Production

Generalized crop-specific or regional blanket fertilizer recommendations are among the primary dilemmas for sustainable agriculture resulting in low fertilizer use efficiency, nutritional imbalance in crops, while raising economic and environmental concerns. Innovative fertilizer formulations with balanced nutrient ratios customized to the crop requirements with temporal release properties are needed to make sustainable agriculture practically possible. For an example, the demonstration of the advantages of delayed differentiation, through reverse blending (RB) in small blending units at the end user level may be useful to increase the sustainability of agriculture. This review discusses how to use innovative fertilizer procedures in the fertilizer supply chain to optimize the supply of crop nutrition to boost crop production and safeguard the environment from the drawbacks of blanket fertilizer applications. This review also aims to identify critical elements that influence fertilizer use efficiency and fertilizer customization to improve fertilizer recommendations for future (precision) agriculture, and to assess the role and suitability of RB in the production of customized fertilizers. We reviewed typical case studies and summarized the role of delayed differentiation in the production of field fertilizers through RB. Customized fertilizers could be produced by using smallest sets of canonical basic inputs (CBI). CBI acronym offers the smallest set of chemical composite materials that can be used as a blending input for the production of customized fertilizers. Reverse blending (RB) accelerates the attainment of large flows by decreasing those flows to discover chemically stable reactions for the creation of novel fertilizer formulations. RB drives the high flow massification to low by managing the flow from 100 to 1.57%. RB requires a minimum of 10–15 CBIs (± 0.05%) to meet out nutritional requirements of many crops. Delayed differentiation through RB will involve exploration of known percentage of CBI in terms of N, P, K, Zn, B 2 O 3 , and filler to achieve a desirable fertilizer. The tailored fertilizers used for basal application must be granular, with at least 90% of the content ranging between 1 and 4-mm IS sieve, with no more than 5% lying below 1 mm. Moisture content should not be present at more than 1.5%. The paper demonstrates RB as a quadratic model approach where blending is based on geographical area, enabling the crops to achieve target yields through customized fertilizer solution with higher agronomic (kg/ha of N, P, K, Zn, B 2 O 3 ) applicability. We understand that innovative fertilizer strategies must be developed to significantly reduce unforeseen negative effects on the environment and human health caused by the improper use of fertilizers.