Fertilizer consumption per hectare

Fertilizer consumption per hectare is the cross-country intensity metric that divides fertilizer consumption by hectares of arable land, expressed in kilograms per hectare. The World Bank carries it as indicator AG.CON.FERT.ZS, describing fertilizer consumption in kilograms per hectare of arable land for every country from 1961 to 2023, with FAO as the underlying source.

The metric's value is comparability: dividing by arable land removes the size effect that makes total consumption useless for cross-country comparison. Our World in Data republishes it among its 25 fertilizer charts under a commercial delivery terms licence, and a cataloged Kaggle dataset joins the World Bank series to fertilizer producer share prices.

• Totals mislead; intensity compares. Kilograms per hectare of arable land is the form that survives cross-country comparison, which is why the World Bank publishes it as a single indicator.

• Licensing differs by republisher. The World Bank series and Our World in Data's commercial delivery terms re-release carry different terms from a Kaggle mirror, so cite the upstream FAO-sourced indicator.

• Intensity is not efficiency. A high kilograms-per-hectare figure reflects cropping intensity and crop mix as much as agronomic practice, so it needs crop-mix context before it becomes a recommendation.

1. Confirm the indicator code. AG.CON.FERT.ZS is the World Bank identifier, and a source without a code is repackaging and should name its upstream.

1. Check the country and year span. The series covers every country from 1961 to 2023, roughly 260 economies, so gaps should be explained rather than discovered.

1. Verify the FAO lineage. The World Bank sources the indicator from FAO, so trace to FAO when a vendor's number disagrees.

1. Mind the licence on re-releases. Our World in Data republishes under commercial delivery terms with attribution, and Kaggle mirrors may add their own terms.

1. Pull it programmatically. The official-api pattern is how the World Bank series is retrieved without manual downloads.

These entries cover the access route and the underlying inputs:

official api is how the World Bank indicator is pulled programmatically instead of by manual download.

plant nutrient is the input measured in kilograms per hectare of arable land across roughly 260 economies.

The intensity series behind this term sits in the catalog's fertilizers-agricultural-chemicals data page.