ISBN-13: 9781536190557
Sustainable Soil Fertility Management mainly focuses on issues related to soil management at the field level, which is a prime concern for crop production that may be improved by adopting several sustainable management practices. Soil fertility is the capability of soil to sustain plant growth and optimize crop yield. This can be enhanced through the use of organic and inorganic fertilizers. Several techniques are suggested that enhance soil fertility and crop production while minimizing environmental impact. Soil fertility canbe further improved by incorporating cover crops that add organic matter to thesoil, which leads to improvedsoilstructure and promotes a healthy, fertile soil; by using green manure or growing legumes to fix nitrogen from the air through the process of biological nitrogen fixation; and by microbes. Fertile soilcontains all the majornutrients necessary to sustain basic plant nutrition (e.g., nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium), as well as othernutrientsneeded in smaller quantities (e.g., calcium, magnesium, sulfur, iron, zinc, copper, manganese, boron, molybdenum, nickel). The book focuses on global strategies with a possible solution for managing the fertility of soil. The book covers soil science, soil fertility, crop production, soil sustainability, and soil management with a modern scientific approach that is helpful for researchers, the scientific community, academicians, business farmers and policymakers.