Nutrient Management and Sustainability of Agriculture

This book focuses on integrated crop nutrient management (ICNM) in a tropical subsistence farming system relevant to South Asian Region and other similar environment. The major objective of this study was to understand the nutrient management practices at the farm level and to see how efficient farmers were in utilizing integrated sources of nutrients to sustain food productions, enhance incomes and their livelihoods. Integrated crop nutrient management is a topic taking prominence over the years due to the challenges of growing more foods to meet the demand of the fast growing world population without further damaging already fragile and degraded natural resource base and the environment. Integrated crop nutrient management is one of the key pillars of sustainable intensification of agriculture the heart of which is to produce more food with less use of resources. Without a balance mix of nutrients in the soil from all sources, the basis of agricultural sustainability is difficult to realize. A number of evidences suggest that nutrients and in particular nitrogen use efficiency in cereal yield have found to be decreasing. It is therefore urgent to work on improving nutrient use efficiency rather than increasing the levels of fertilizer applications. This is the area where much of the book is focused on.

This work consists of 10 chapters. The first introduction chapter outlines the need of producing more food to feed the ever-growing population without further causing declined of soil nutrients and proposing ways to arrest nutrient mining in the soil. Other chapters give the basic understanding of the concept of integrated plant nutrition, farming system analysis, soil fertility assessment, analyses of nitrogen-yield equations in paddy, wheat and maize as well as the environmental impacts of fertilizers and sustainability of farming systems. The text is presented in a sequential and an easy manner so that readers get straightforward understanding of the issues. The research design chapter has enriched with more on quantitative procedures in which students in general have less interest and attention. In the text, therefore, quantitative approaches is employed with several examples to illustrate inferential statistics and hypotheses tests with appropriate data set included to encourage students to use statistical procedures in their research works.