For the proper management of water and fertilizer resources, distributions of water and solute in soil should be precisely predicted. The movement of water and solute in soil may be expressed with partial differential equations (PDEs). The PDEs should be numerically solved for real world applications because of complex initial and boundary conditions and high non-linearity in some cases. The recent development of a general PDE solver using the finite element method enabled us to more easily solve these PDEs governing water and solute transport in soil. FlexPDE Lite can be freely obtained through the Internet, and its applicability to solve water and solute transport in soil was investigated. FlexPDE Lite successfully simulated water infiltration into Haverkamp’s sandy soil with <2% of mass balance errors. However, it failed to calculate water infiltration into dry loamy sand when initial pressure head was < — 60 cm. Results of simulating solute transport with FlexPDE Lite also agreed well with analytical solutions especially when the convective transport was not dominant. Therefore, FlexPDE Lite, although its performances were purposely limited, could be an ideal tool for a training purpose or a small-scale simulation.
