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The concept of soil fertility and its management to improve crop yields is not new perhaps it is as old as the development of agriculture by man. In ancient time also, they had knowledge of applying manures such as farm yard manure, green manure, night soil, bone, wood ashes, etc., to soil for the purpose of increasing crop yields.
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Xenophan (430-355 B.C), a Greek historian first recorded the merits of green manure crops. He wrote “But then whatever weeds are upon the ground, being turned into the earth, enrich the soil as much as dung “meaning incorporating weeds in to soils is as good as applying dung.
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Cato (234-149 B.C) wrote a practical hand book and recommended intensive cultivation, crop rotations, and the use of legumes for livestock farming. He was first to classify “Land” based on specific crops.
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Columella (A.D. 45) emphasized the usefulness of turnips for soil improvements. He also advocated land drainage and the use of ashes, marl (lime deposits), clover and alfalfa to make the soil more productive.
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Jethro Tull (1731) and Francis Home (1757) claimed that Nitre (Nitrate Salts), water, air, earth, Epsom salt (MgSO4), Saltpetre (Sodium & Potassium Nitrate), Vitriolated tarter (Potassium sulfate) and Olive oil increased plant growth.
Almost all of the present knowledge about the mineral nutrition has been acquired relatively recently during the last 135 years or so. These developments happened in a slow and gradual manner.
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In the early 19th century two prominent scientists, Nicholas Theodore de Seussure (1804), a Swiss Physicist and Jean Baptiste Boussingault(1834), a French Chemist & Agriculturist, were first to report that plants need mineral nutrients for growth and development. J.B.Boussingault was the first to start field plot experiments on his farm.
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Justus Von Liebig (1840), a German chemist, reported that growing plants obtain elements Ca, K, S and P from the soil, whereas carbon from CO2 in the air and not from the soil. He also suggested that plants obtain H & O from air as well as from water and N from ammonia. He also established certain basic principles of sound soil management; ·
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A cropped soil is restored to fertility only by adding to it all minerals & N removed by the plants. ·
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He established the theory of “Law of Minimum” in relation to plant nutrition. The law states that the productivity of a crop is decided by most limiting factor. He is regarded as the “Father of Agricultural Chemistry”
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John B. Lawes (1837) of the Rothamsted Experiment station, England was first to make and use Super phosphate on his farm (1840). Both J.B.Lawes & J.H. Gilbert (1852) applied the principles of Liebig and stated that addition of mineral fertilizers to cropped soils would keep the soil fertile. They further elaborated the chemistry of plant nutrition.
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A. Gris (1844) discovered that the ‘Chlorosis’ of some plants can be corrected by sprays of iron salt and demonstrated its essential nature in plant nutrition.
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By 1860, German Botanist Julius Von Sachs and others, established the essentiality of 10 nutrient elements and were using these elements in the synthetic mineral nutrient solutions for the growth of plant. Discovery of other five nutrients was made after more than 60-70 years, while the last one in the group “Chlorine” has established to be essential for plant growth only in 1954.
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