Fertilizer application is a common anthropogenic alteration to terrestrial systems. Increased nutrient input can impact soil microbial diversity or function directly through altered soil environments, or indirectly through plant-microbe feedbacks, with potentially important effects on ecologically-important plant-associated mutualists. We investigated the impacts of plant fertilizer, containing...

Nutrient losses due to leaching, volatilization and fixation and the activated risk of nitrate leaching after fertilizer addition to the soil may be reduced through the use of slow-release fertilizers. Turmeric, a long duration and high yielding commercial crop consumes greater amount of nutrients from the soil as well as from applied fertilizers for a prolonged period. A field experiment was c...

Commonly N release from legume residues is rapid in the tropics. Legume mixtures with grasses can result in slower nutrient release from residues, better matching the N requirements of the following crop. The objectives of this study were to evaluate the effects of the green manures sunnhemp (Crotalaria juncea) and millet (Pennisetum glaucum), alone or mixed, on the performance of a subsequent ...

The sugarcane stalk borers, Sesamia spp. (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae) are the most destructive sugarcane insect pests in Iran. The efficiency of Telenomus busseolae Gahan (Hymenoptera: Scelionidae) used alone or in combination with silicon fertilization was investigated for controlling the sugarcane stalk borers under field conditions. The treatments were: a combination of silicon plus multiple rel...

Dissolved phosphorus (P) in runoff from surface-applied fertilizers can be relatively great, but commonly used, field or watershed-scale computer models often do not simulate direct transfer of fertilizer P to runoff. Using data from our own simulated rainfall experiments and published runoff studies, we developed a simplemodel to predict fertilizer P release during rain and the concentration o...

The Haber–Bosch process for the commercial production of ammonia demonstrated in 1913 was a watershed event in the mass production of urea, the principal nitrogen fertilizer for modern agriculture. Today, thanks to the so-called “green revolution” starting in in the 1960s, nearly half of the world population relies on increased crop yields, through the use of nitrogen fertilizers, to access aff...