Emerging Strategies for Sustaining Higher Productivity and Ensuring Soil Quality under Intensive Agriculture

摘要

The country wide on-going long-term experiments revealed that the rate of response to added fertilisers and the factor productivity of major crops are declining year after year under intensive cropping systems due to high nutrient turnover in soil-plant system coupled with low and imbalanced fertiliser use,emerging deficiencies of micro and secondary nutrients(S,Zn,B,Fe,Mn etc.),acidification and aluminium toxicity in acid soils,insufficient input of organic resources because of other competitive uses,wide nutrient gap between nutrient demand and supply,consequent deterioration in soil physical,biological and chemical quality and low fertiliser use efficiency etc.This highlights the urgency for developing efficient nutrient management strategies for sustaining higher crop productivity and soil quality under intensive agriculture systems.The results of series of long-term experiments conducted all over India revealed that the Integrated Plant Nutrient Supply System(IPNS)involving farmyard manure(FYM)and inorganic fertilisers not only helped in improving the productivity of the major cropping systems but also maintained better soil quality on cost-effective basis.The practices of liming or amending the soil with organic manures have substantially improved the productivity of the acid soils and also arrested decline in soil pH.More recently the site-specific nutrient management(SSNM)and Soil Test Crop Response(STCR)based prescriptions are gaining popularity due to their superiority over blanket nutrient recommendations.Field trials conducted in different agro-ecological zones with different cropping systems revealed that the STCR based IPNS system produced higher crop yields and maintained better nutrient status as compared to blanket or STCR based inorganic fertilisers alone.The role of these recent nutrient management approaches in sustaining higher productivity and better soil quality under different cropping systems has been highlighted in this paper.