A greenhouse pot test was conducted to study the impacts of replacing mineral fertilizer with organic fertilizers for one full growing period on soil fertility, tomato yield and quality using soils with different tomato planting history. Four types of fertilization regimes were compared: (1) conventional fertilizer with urea, (2) chicken manure compost, (3) vermicompost, and (4) no fertilizer. ...

Effects of different fertilizers on organic carbon (C) storage and turnover of soil fractions remains unclear. We combined soil fractionation with isotope analyses to examine soil organic carbon (SOC) dynamics after 25 years of fertilization. Five types of soil samples including the initial level (CK) and four fertilization treatments (inorganic nitrogen fertilizer, N; balanced inorganic fertil...

Solutions to meet growing food requirements in a world of limited suitable land and degrading environment focus mainly on increasing crop yields, particularly in poorly performing regions, and reducing animal product consumption. Increasing yields could alleviate land requirements, but imposing higher soil nutrient withdrawals and in most cases larger fertilizer inputs. Lowering animal product ...

To effectively manage soil fertility, knowledge is needed of how a crop uses nutrients from fertilizer applied to the soil. Soil quality is a combination of biological, chemical and physical properties and is hard to assess directly because of collective and multiple functional effects. In this paper, we focus on the application of these concepts to agriculture. We define the baseline fertility...

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...

Nitrogen (N) export from soils to streams and groundwater under the intensifying cropping schemes of the Pampas is modest compared to intensively cultivated basins of Europe and North America; however, a slow N enrichment of water resources has been suggested. We (1) analyzed the fate of fertilizer N and (2) evaluated the contribution of fertilizer and soil organic matter (SOM) to N leaching un...

This paper develops a soil conservation model that is relevant to smallholder farmers who applylittle or no fertilizer. Empirical results drawn from northern Tanzania imply that, ignoringfertility mining problem in model specification leads to overestimation of profits for farms thatapply little or no fertilizer. The model also shows that, the impact of output price on soilc...

The potential for non-point-source pollution of surface waters from agricultural lands continues to be a concern. Our objective was to determine the effect of surface residue management and fertilizer application timing in regards to soil moisture conditions on nutrient losses in runoff. Studies were conducted using a rainfall simulator that applied 125 mm h-1 for 3 h to an Austin (Udorthentic ...

Appropriate fertilizer application is an important management practice to improve soil fertility and quality in the red soil regions of China. In the present study, we examined the effects of five fertilization treatments [these were: no fertilizer (CK), rice straw return (SR), chemical fertilizer (NPK), organic manure (OM) and green manure (GM)] on soil pH, soil organic carbon (SOC), total nit...

Soil N is a major factor limiting crop production in maize-based agriculture in the tropics. In this study, soil N dynamics and efficiency of N use by maize was investigated in five cropping systems (CSs) over two annual cropping phases. The CSs comprised cereal-legume (CS1, CS2, CS3), cereal-cereal (CS4) and cereal-bare fallow (CS5) rotations with three rates of N fertiliser application to mai...