Excerpt
The goal of nutrient management is to optimize nutrient's advantages, and minimize their disadvantages. Nutrient use efficiency has to consider the effect and link between a field's soil, the crop, the weather, and hydrology, along with the practices being used on the property, such as irrigation, fertilizer, and manure management. This is a tall order. In addition, a nutrient manager's decisions have the potential to increase the use efficiency of one element, while simultaneously reducing the efficiency of a second nutrient, increasing its losses (Delgado and Lemunyon, 2006). Luckily, a new nitrogen index tool has been developed to coincide with multiple nutrients in varying scenarios. The goal to develop a nitrogen index is not new, and for the past twenty years various nitrogen indexes have been built (Follett et al., 1991, Shaffer and Delgado, 2002). This “new” index is based on the previous work, but is considered new for three reasons: 1) expanded/combined information, 2) international input, and 3) the ease of use while connecting to phosphorus indexes and simulation models. The Nitrogen Index Tool version 1.0 builds also on the modeling software, “Nitrate Leaching and Economic Analysis Package …
Footnotes
Jorge Delgado is a soil scientist with the U.S. Department of Ariculture's (USDA) Agricultural Research Service (ARS) Soil Plant Nutirent Research Program in Fort Collins, Colorado. Marvin Shaffer is with Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado. Chengensu Hu is a professor and Director, and Xioaxin Li is a Ph.D. student, for the Center for Agricultural Resources Research at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shijiazhuang, China. Raul S. Lavado and Helena Rimski-Korsakov are with the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina. Jose Cueto Wong is with the INIFAP in Durango, Mexico. Pamela Joosse is with the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture and Food in Ontario, Canada. Ronald Follett is the research leader at the USDA-ARS Soil Plant Nutirent Research Program in Fort Collins, Colorado. Wilfredo Colon is with the Universidad del Este in Carolina, Puerto Rico. David Sotomayor is a soil scientist at the UPR in Mayaguez in Puerto Rico.
- Copyright 2006 by the Soil and Water Conservation Society