Trials
Forage sorghum trial: 14% more dry matter through a dry spell
The real test of a fertiliser is not a good season. It is a bad one. This trial ran through two months with no rain, and the gap between the treated and untreated strips got wider, not smaller.
The setup
The trial sat on Camm Group country at Dalby, Queensland, on a property running 4,500 hectares of cropping across red chromosol and black vertosol soils. The trial area was 12 hectares of dryland forage sorghum. Agnano liquid fertiliser went in-furrow at sowing on 9 December 2025, with a matched control strip alongside. The crop was harvested in May 2026.
A two-month dry season was recorded across the trial period. No irrigation, and effectively no rainfall to fall back on.
The result
Despite zero rainfall, the Agnano-treated strip delivered a 14% increase in dry matter yield. That came out to an extra 3.26 tonnes of dry matter per hectare against the control.
For a grazing or fodder operation, dry matter is the product. An extra 3.26 tonnes a hectare is more feed in the paddock or more silage in the pit from the same ground, the same seed, and the same rain that did not come.
Dryland forage sorghum through a two-month dry season.
When the agronomist pulled plants, the difference was in the roots. The Agnano plants showed markedly stronger root development than the control.
Why it held up under stress
A deeper, denser root system reaches moisture and nutrition that a shallow one cannot, and in a dry season that is the whole game. In dryland cereals, deeper root distribution and better root anatomy are directly linked to higher yield and water-use efficiency under low water (Li et al., 2024). The reason it showed up here traces back to how the fertiliser behaves in the soil.
Conventional water-soluble products need moisture to move the nutrient to the plant, and in a dry spell that moisture is not there, so the nutrient sits stranded. Agnano is different. The nutrients are pre-complexed into micro and sub-micron particles held at the root zone from sowing, so supply is matched to demand rather than dumped early (Shaviv and Mikkelsen, 1993). They do not depend on a rain event to become available, and they do not leach away when rain finally arrives. Early field work is beginning to link nano-scale nutrition to better drought tolerance, though the evidence is still emerging and crop-specific (Abdulmajeed et al., 2025).
Final Results
Dryland country lives and dies on water-use efficiency. A crop that builds a better root system early gets more out of every millimetre that does fall. On this trial, that showed up as 3.26 DM t/ha or 14% more dry matter through a season most growers would write off.
Field results move with soil type, sowing date and season, so the honest advice is the same as always. Run a control strip on your own ground and measure it. If you want help setting up a dryland trial this season, get in touch.
References
Li, P.-F., Ma, B.-L., Wei, X.-F., Guo, S. and Ma, Y.-Q. (2024). Deeper root distribution and optimized root anatomy help improve dryland wheat yield and water use efficiency under low water conditions. Plant and Soil, 501(1-2), 437-454. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11104-024-06526-9
Shaviv, A. and Mikkelsen, R.L. (1993). Controlled-release fertilizers to increase efficiency of nutrient use and minimize environmental degradation: a review. Fertilizer Research, 35(1-2), 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00750215
Abdulmajeed, A.M. et al. (2025). Improved mineral nutrient absorption and targeted tissue deposition via nano-fertilizers boost drought tolerance in maize (Zea mays L.). Archives of Agronomy and Soil Science, 71(1), 1-22. https://doi.org/10.1080/03650340.2025.2549808
