Every system or product that is introduced to a market must meet some basic or fundamental need of that market, or it will quickly fade away. Those products that work well for meeting a basic need, will have staying power and become a staple material supplied to that market. This is the global story of Multicote™ in the ornamental nursery market.
Nursery growers have quite a job when you consider theirs is most often a business of managing logistics with the goal of cost-effective production at a maximum rate of turnover. Quickly moving a crop along from being planted to being sold is most often the grower’s goal. Supplying optimum crop nutrition in a cost-effective manner means reducing the number of hours spent overseeing the fertilization program and the number of hours spent applying fertilizer to the plants while providing a measured, daily nutrition program that promotes healthy, vigorous plants. Multicote™ controlled release fertilizer helps provide a happy solution to achieve these goals.
Multicote™ supplies a plant the nutrients it needs, when it needs it, without daily oversight and management. By working with knowledgeable Haifa professionals in conjunction with local crop consultants, a plants’ seasonal crop nutrition needs can be estimated and planned for based on the crop being grown and the season and environment the crop is being grown in. Using the crops nutritional needs as a template, a Multicote™ formulation meeting the crop’s nutritional needs can be chosen from our complete line of professional blends or designed just for the grower. Once a grower applies the fertilizer at the prescribed rate, most of the work normally associated with management and application of fertilizer is finished. While the grower still needs to monitor his crop’s nutrition levels, the job of managing the crop’s nutrition program becomes much easier because he can focus daily on other things knowing the Multicote™ is doing its job day by day releasing a measured rate of nutrients to the plant as the plant has need of them. 
While the grower enjoys the peace of mind and time management Multicote™ supplies, the primary savings in time, money, and effort for the nursery business that uses Multicote™ generally comes from the reduced number of trips through the field by personnel applying multiple applications of uncoated fertilizer. Rather than applying fertilizer on a monthly or bi-weekly basis, the Multicote™ can be applied once and supply nutrients for an entire season. The cost savings quickly add up as fewer truck trips are needed to obtain the fertilizer, less loading and unloading, mixing, spreading, etc., and perhaps saving the most money, fewer of the numerous trips through the nursery are required over the course of a year by workers applying fertilizer, leaving them time to do other important tasks.
Perhaps the most important need met by the right Multicote™ based nutrition program is the health of the plant. Plants, like people, generally thrive when they have an optimum daily level of nutrition rather than large amounts of nutrition on an infrequent or irregular basis. Since Hoagland developed his solution in 1933, the movement in crop fertilization has moved progressively toward the idea of supplying a constant, optimum level of nutrients to the plant relative in time to the plants nutritional needs. Over time, growers have slowly and consistently moved from using large, single doses of soluble fertilizer toward the concept of supplying the right amount of nutrition minute by minute according to a plant’s needs. This is the real power of a Multicote™ based program. Plants generally grow more and need more nutrition as soil temperature rises; Multicote mirrors this growth by releasing more fertilizer as the soil temperature increases. Therefore, the plants are given a constant supply of well-balanced nutrition at all times at levels that mirror the plant’s needs.
This then is the global story of Multicote™ in the nursery market. Multicote™ gives peace of mind and allows a manager to daily focus on the things that are important to him rather than chasing the urgent need of constantly supervising his crop nutrition program. Multicote™ helps reduce labor and costs traditionally associated with multiple fertilizer applications. Perhaps most important to a grower, Multicote provides the foundation for optimal plant health by providing a constant, measured, crop responsive source of healthy plant nutrition. Because it meets a basic need in a powerful way, the global story of Multicote should have chapters written for many years to come.
