Microbes are the key components of the soil environment, playing important roles during soil development. Soil parent material provides the foundation elements that comprise the basic nutritional environment for the development of microbial community. After 30 years artificial maturation of cultivation, the soil developments of three different parental materials were evaluated and bacterial com...

Pesticide residues contributing to the contamination of soil may influence microbial population of the soil and in turn fertility of soil. The present paper reports the effect of pesticides applied to soybean i.e. phorate, carbofuran, carbosulfan, thiomethoxam, imidacloprid, chlorpyriphos and monocrotophos on soil microflora. The viable count of rhizobia and phosphate solubilizing bacteria from...

Multistrata agroforestry systems with tree crops comprise a variety of land use systems ranging from plantations of coffee, cacao or tea with shade trees to highly diversified homegardens and multi-storey tree gardens. Research on plant-soil interactions has concentrated on the former. Tree crop-based land use systems are more efficient in maintaining soil fertility than annual cropping systems...

Increasing the current precision of nutrient management will need analytical tools that aid in collecting site specific data. A technology with potential is hyperspectral remote sensing. Modern, portable spectroradiometers permit reflectance data in the spectral region between 350 and 2500 nm to be collected quickly. With the limited sampling, handling, and processing required the technology al...

Yam (Dioscorea spp.) is a tuber crop grown for food security, income generation, and traditional medicine. This crop has a high cultural value for some of the groups growing it. Most of the production comes from West Africa where the increased demand has been covered by enlarging cultivated surfaces while the mean yield remained around 10 t tuber ha-1. In West Africa, yam is traditionally culti...

12 Complex relationships exist between different components of the organic farm and 13 the quantity and quality of the end products depend on the functioning of the whole 14 system. As such, it is very difficult to isolate soil fertility from production and 15 environmental aspects of the system. Crop rotation is the central tool that integrates 16 the maintenance and development of soil fertil...

In the long-term absence of major disturbances ecosystems enter a state of retrogression, which involves declining soil fertility and consequently a reduction in decomposition rates. Recent studies have looked at how plant traits such as specific leaf mass and amounts of secondary compounds respond to declining soil fertility during retrogression, but there are no comparable studies for lichen ...

Large-scale soil application of biochar may enhance soil fertility, increasing crop production for the growing human population, while also sequestering atmospheric carbon. But reaching these beneficial outcomes requires an understanding of the relationships among biochar's structure, stability, and contribution to soil fertility. Using quantitative (13)C nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectr...

consumption of manure from livestock and human health aspect and their utilization as fuel, animal feed and fertilizer are important. due to the domination of livestock farming system, limited number of animals and lack of chemical fertilizer in the traditional agriculture, consumption of animal manure in the agricultural land of country was in an efficient way. introduction of   chemical ferti...