Enhancing Nutrient Use Efficiency: Concepts, Methods and Management Interventions

Nutrient use efficiency is a measure of how efficiently plants use the available

mineral nutrients to produce economic produce. Improving nutrient use efficiency

is very much essential under current scenario besides an understanding of the

nutrient dynamics in soil-plant system.”Enhancing nutrient use efficiency:

Concepts, methods, and management interventions” is a comprehensive book

which has a compilation of topics related to enhancement of nutrient use

efficiency of various crops and cropping systems. Although it depends on the

ability to plants to take up the nutrients from the soil, management practices

have a key role to intervene the use efficiency. This book has 27 chapters

written by eminent researchers in the field and addresses multifaceted

approaches to enhance the nutrient use efficiency. Improving nutrient use

efficiency is a prerequisite to reducing production costs in the wake of escalating

cost of agricultural inputs in farming besides minimizing environmental

contamination. Soil physical management is the foremost strategy to enhance

the nutrient use efficiency. Hand held devices are popular among the farmers

for nitrogen management in rice in several parts of the country, besides slow

release nitrogenous fertilizers. Experiences from Long term fertilizer

experiments and soil test crop response correlation are of immense use to

understand the nutrient dynamics in soil and in turn designing practices for

higher use efficiency. Besides describing the concepts and methods of nutrient

use efficiency, management practices for dry land crops and cropping systems,

cereal based cropping systems, rainfed pulses based cropping systems, soybean

based cropping systems, sugarcane based cropping systems, cotton based

cropping systems, tobacoo and oil seed based cropping systems, rapeseedmustard

based cropping systems and spices based cropping systems are also

dealt in this book and would serve as a resource guide for enhancing nutrient

use efficiency in various crops and cropping systems