Nutrient management for improving crop, soil, and environmental quality

Abstract

Agricultural intensification and mechanization has resulted overall deterioration in soil-based ecosystem making it poor reserve of nutrients and organic matter and contributes to loss of biodiversity, thereby damaging sustainability of agricultural production, soil resilience capacity, and environmental quality. All these necessitate adopting strategies to improve resource use efficiency to meet burgeoning demand for food from shrinking land areas. Efficient nutrient management strategies pave the way to combat the challenges by tackling the over and under use of nutrients, checking different kinds of losses from the system, and improving use efficiency of the crops. Application of targeted, sufficient, and balanced quantities of inorganic fertilizers will be necessary to make nutrients available for high yields without polluting the environment. At the same time, every effort should be made to improve the availability and use of secondary nutrients and micronutrients, organic fertilizers, and soil conservation practices to augment crop yield and quality in an efficient and environmentally benign manner, without sacrificing soil health and/or productivity of future generations.