CASE STUDY

Maintaining Tomato Yield With 39% Less Nitrogen Using NanobOx

A 2025 field trial conducted in Vila Franca de Xira, Portugal evaluated NanobOx nanobubble treatment of irrigation water under commercial outdoor drip irrigated tomato farming conditions. Despite starting late in the crop cycle and operating under near fully oxygen-saturated water conditions, the NanobOx treatment maintained yield while reducing nitrogen application by 39%, demonstrating a substantial increase in nutrient-use efficiency and strong commercial potential for optimisation-focused agriculture.
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Written by
John Favier
Read Duration
5 min
Published
November 2025
Given ever tightening regulations around fertiliser use, the ability to maintain yield with such drastic reductions in nitrogen will be highly impactful to growers everywhere.
Context
  • Crop: Processing tomatoes
  • Location: Vila Franca de Xira, Portugal
  • Season: 2025
  • Trial Type: 1.5 ha trial plot, drip-fertigated
  • NanobOx Equipment Used: Inline nanobubble generator, 36 m3/h water flow capacity
  • Treatment Duration: Start at 49 days after transplanting until one week before harvest
Control (left) vs. NanobOx-treated (right) lettuce in NFT system

Key Results

1. Yield maintained using 39% less nitrogen

Despite substantially reduced nitrogen, yield in the NanobOx-treated sector was only 2.7% lower than the fully fertilised control plots.

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2. Mitigating negative effect of lower fertiliser

A neighbouring sector, which also received the 39% less fertiliser but without NanobOx nanobubble water treatment, showed significantly lower yield (−10.7% vs control), whereas the NanobOx-treated field outperformed it by +9.0% (11.9 t/ha).

Interpretation: NanobOx mitigated typical yield losses associated with fertiliser reduction, supporting better nutrient availability and fertiliser use efficiency

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3. Product quality maintained
  • Brix and colour were nearly identical between NanobOx and control
  •  No negative impact on product quality attributes.

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4. Seamless technical integration

NanobOx equipment operated continuously and integrated smoothly with the existing pressurised fertigation system, requiring no changes to pumps, hydraulics, or water scheduling.

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Why These Results Matter

NanobOx nananobubble treatment demonstrated:

✔ Strong fertiliser use efficiency (FUE)
✔ Yield was maintained with much lower fertiliser applied
✔ No negative impact on fruit quality
✔ System reliability and low-maintenance operation of NanobOx

This shows that NanobOx provides significant economic and environmental advantages by reducing input costs and enabling growers to meet any regulatory limitations on fertiliser use.

Commercial Takeaways

NanobOx offers growers a pathway to:

  • Cut nitrogen use dramatically while maintaining yield
  • Improve fertiliser use efficiency
  • Increase environmental sustainability
  • Easy plug-and-play deployment without operational disruption