Brazil is the fourth largest consumer of fertilizers in the world. Among these, bulk blends fertilizers are the most consumed in the country. After updating of Brazilian legislation in regard to fertilizers in 2004, many producers claim that there was an excessive increase in the strictness of legislation concerning inspection of nutrient levels in those products. Within this context, the objective of this study was to provide an exploratory and descriptive statistical analysis to the data gathered by MAPA (Ministry of Agriculture) from the inspection of the fertilizer industry from the years 2008 to 2010, looking for the most important source of variation, including producer, formula, and laboratory, and verifying if the minimum requirements established by law are being practiced. These data, separated by producer, formula, laboratory, particle size, and period, were subjected to descriptive analysis, followed by logistic regression. Logistic regression showed that for nitrogen and phosphorus analyzed by the laboratory with the greatest number of observations, the "producer" and "formula" variables affect the final results (not-in-conformity or in-conformity), whereas for potassium analyzed by the same laboratory, only the "formula" variable affected the results.
bulk blend fertilizer; logistic regression; legislation
