2022 Volume 10 Pages 1-13
Sustainable use and management of fertilizers depend on the plant nutrition and fertilizer recommendation approaches. The Build-Up and Maintenance approaches are based on the concept of “Feed the soil and Feed the crop” where fertilizers are applied over the selected time period until nutrient levels are raised to the critical soil test levels, then applications are continued at a rate to maintain the nutrient levels to sustain that soil test. The common approach of fertilizer adjustments based on Soil test rating equates general or blanket recommendation to medium fertility status of soil available NPK. For soils testing low or high category, the fertilizer recommendations are increased or decreased by 30 per cent of the general recommendations. Nutrient recommendations through post-harvest soil test values prediction equations have much practical significance. The relevance and value of soil testing increases through yield targeting based fertilizer recommendations. Futuristic approaches like precision agriculture, use of GIS, GPS and RS, Cloud computing, and Big data are versatile components of plant nutrients / fertilizer recommendation. In these approaches, variability of conditions in each field is accounted for and fertilizer recommendation is made precisely so as to optimize the use of soil resources, increase yield, reduce production costs, minimize negative impacts to the environment and ensure optimum returns from its investment. Digital Ag and Big Data analytics bring new opportunities to yield optimization by precision fertilizer management.
