Nutrient Use In Crop Production

If you?re an agronomist, horticulturalist, plant and soil scientist, breeder, or soil microbiologist, you?ll want to read Nutrient Use in Crop Production to find everything you need to know about judicious nutrient management and maximizing nutrient utilization in the agricultural landscape. In this book, you?ll discover ways to minimize undesirable nutrient losses and techniques for preserving the environment while meeting the challenges of providing the earth?s increasing population with sufficient food, feed, and fiber to sustain life. Your existing knowledge base concerning this vital area of science will expand and grow as you become more open to the new ideas and applications contained in Nutrient Use in Crop Production. Most importantly, you?ll avoid the narrow scope found in most crop nutrition books and take a broader, more globally minded view of how to maximize nutrient use and minimize nutrient losses in the soil of agricultural systems. Specifically, you?ll find these and other areas covered: population growth, food production, and nutrient requirements managing soil fertility decline the role of nitrogen fixation in crop production delivering fertilizers through seed coatings micronutrient fertilizers the role of nutrient-efficient crops in modern agriculture Feeding the world without depleting the world?s viable soil nutrients is a monumental task--but one that can be achieved, as evidenced in the pages of Nutrient Use in Crop Production. You and your circle of students, professionals, and administrators will benefit greatly from this in-depth view of nutrient use in both developed and non-industrialized counties to give you a better sense of how to allow both the world and the world?s crops to grow.

This collection reviews current research on understanding nutrient cycles, the ways crops process nutrients, the environmental effects of fertilizer use and how this understanding can be used to improve nutrient use efficiency for a more resource-efficient and climate-smart agriculture. Parts 1-3 summarise research on the primary macronutrients: nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. Chapter review what we know about nutrient cycles, crop nutrient processing, potential environmental effects and ways of optimising nutrient use efficiency (NUE). The fourth section of the book discusses secondary macronutrients and micronutrients including: calcium, magnesium, sulphur, zinc, boron, manganese and molybdenum. The final two parts of the book review research on optimising fertiliser use. Chapters cover topics such as assessing nutrient availability, decision support systems for optimising crop nutrition, advances in site-specific nutrient management and advances in integrated plant nutrient management. Other chapters discuss enhanced efficiency fertilisers, the use of bio-effectors/bio-stimulants, fertigation techniques and the use of organic amendments. With its distinguished editor and international team of expert authors, this will be a standard reference on optimising crop nutrition for the crop science and farming community.

The cropping system is one of the important components of sustainable agriculture, since it provides more efficient nutrient cycling. As such, balanced fertilization must be based on the concept of sustainable crop production. Feeding the rapidly growing world population using environmentally sustainable production systems is a major challenge, especially in developing countries. A number of studies have highlighted the fact that degradation of the world's cultivated soils is largely responsible for low and plateauing yields. Soil is lost rapidly but only formed over millennia, and this represents the greatest global threat to nutrient dynamics in agriculture. This means that nutrient management is essential to provide food and nutritional security for current and future generations. Nutrient dynamics and soil sustainability imply the maintenance of the desired ecological balance, the enhancement and preservation of soil functions, and the protection of biodiversity above and below ground. Understanding the role of nutrient management as a tool for soil sustainability and nutritional security requires a holistic approach to a wide range of soil parameters (biological, physical, and chemical) to assess the soil functions and nutrient dynamics of a crop management system within the desired timescale. Further, best nutrient management approaches are important to advance soil sustainability and food and nutritional security without compromising the soil quality and productive potential. Sustainable management practices must allow environmentally and economically sustainable yields and restore soil health and sustainability. This book presents soil management approaches that can provide a wide range of benefits, including improved fertility, with a focus on the importance of nutrient dynamics. Discussing the broad impacts of nutrients cycling on the sustainability of soil and the cropping systems that it supports, it also addresses nutrient application to allow environmentally and economically sustainable agroecosystems that restore soil health. Arguing that balanced fertilization must be based on the concept of INM for a cropping system rather than a crop, it provides a roadmap to nutrient management for sustainability. This richly illustrated book features tables, figures and photographs and includes extensive up-to-date references, making it a valuable resource for policymakers and researchers, as well as undergraduate and graduate students of Soil Science, Agronomy, Ecology and Environmental Sciences.

Put Theory into Practice Scarcity of natural resources, higher costs, higher demand, and concerns about environmental pollution- under these circumstances, improving food supply worldwide with adequate quantity and quality is fundamental. Based on the author's more than forty years of experience, The Use of Nutrients in Crop Plants

Nutrient Use Efficiency in Plants: Concepts and Approaches is the ninth volume in the Plant Ecophysiology series. It presents a broad overview of topics related to improvement of nutrient use efficiency of crops. Nutrient use efficiency (NUE) is a measure of how well plants use the available mineral nutrients. It can be defined as yield (biomass) per unit input (fertilizer, nutrient content). NUE is a complex trait: it depends on the ability to take up the nutrients from the soil, but also on transport, storage, mobilization, usage within the plant, and even on the environment. NUE is of particular interest as a major target for crop improvement. Improvement of NUE is an essential pre-requisite for expansion of crop production into marginal lands with low nutrient availability but also a way to reduce use of inorganic fertilizer.

The first book on crop nutrition that covers topics from soil hydrology to molecular biology! The first book ever to elucidate so many different aspects of mineral nutrition of crops, Mineral Nutrition of Crops: Fundamental Mechanisms and Implications will allow you to grasp the complexity of the soil-water-plant-microbe interactions governing nutrient uptake and utilization by crops. By emphasizing a fundamental mechanistic approach, this book effectively complements the monograph Nutrient Use in Crop Production (The Haworth Press, Inc.). With Mineral Nutrition of Crops you will explore the many facets necessary to increase crop and pasture yields and minimize unwanted losses of nutrients to the environment. Mineral Nutrition of Crops covers a wide range of topics that span several scientific disciplines: agriculture, agronomy, botany, forestry, ecology, plant science, and soil science. From this book, you will gain vital knowledge required to understand the complexity of mechanisms and processes governing nutrient transport toward roots, including biological and chemical reactions influencing nutrient availability in the rhizosphere, uptake by root cells, long-distance transport toward grain, and the role of nutrients in metabolism. Also, you will explore issues relating to the following topics: biology and chemistry of nutrient availability in the rhizosphere kinetics of nutrient uptake by plant cells role of mineral photosynthesis and yield formation importance of seed nutrient reserves in crop growth and development breeding crops for improved nutrient efficiency significance of root size for plant production monitoring water and nutrient fluxes down the profile From Mineral Nutrition of Crops , you will gain the knowledge you need to understand and improve methods of crop growth and nutrition. Mineral Nutrition of Crops is an indispensable manual for anyone involved in the many aspects of growing crops.