Smart Fertilizers vs. Nano-fertilizers: A Pictorial Overview

Abstract

Due to the rapid population growth, the global food production should be increased to meet this global demand. Agriculture is considered the main dominant channel of food supply and any approach can support the crop productivity is urgent. These agro-practices may include using the high-yield varieties, improving irrigation and fertilization. It is noticed that, using of chemical or mineral fertilizers in agricultural production dramatically increased the global food production. Several negative impacts have been recorded worldwide on the environment, which resulted from leaching of nutrients into groundwater, beside the decline the efficiency of applied fertilizers. Applying of nanofertilizers, is a promising approach, and an effective technology, which can increase sustainability and efficiency of agro-production of cultivated crops because of their nano-size properties, their high nutrient use efficiency, their slow release of nutrients, and thereby low required applied dose of fertilizer. Smart fertilizer means the controlling of applied fertilizers in their dose and time using the smart agriculture through technological and advanced tools such as global positioning systems, and remote sensing. These tools are able to maximize crop yield and minimize agro-chemical inputs by precise monitoring of the environment. Therefore, this work is a comparison between smart fertilizer and nanofertilizer, and to answer the main question: are the bio-nanofertilizers considered emerging precision agriculture strategy? This is also a call by EBSS for receiving articles on smart fertilizer, under many related topics such as different applications of smart fertilizers in smart agriculture, challenges, their obstacles and the novel solutions in this concern.