The study, which offers recommendations for improving fertilizer use and increasing crop yields for farmers, builds on previous studies Schoenau and Peak have completed as collaborators at Canadian Light Source (CLS) at USask. Schoenau considers some of their work done on the HXMA and VLS-PGM beamlines at the CLS to be ground-breaking. “There are not a lot of folks that have used these techniques to study the fate of some of these nutrient elements in the soil environment as applied in the field,” said Schoenau. Using chemical analysis and synchrotron techniques, the team looked at soil micronutrients in soil samples from Saskatchewan, Alberta and Manitoba.