Agribusiness, Agriculture, Veterinary Medicine, Cassava, Garri, food security, Agritech and the Red Meat Value Chain.
Saturday, January 28, 2017
Nanoparticle fertilizer could contribute to new 'green revolution'.
The 'Green Revolution' of the '60s and '70s has been credited with helping to feed billions around the world, with fertilizers being one of the key drivers spurring the agricultural boom. But in developing countries, the cost of fertilizer remains relatively high and can limit food production. Now researchers report a simple way to make a benign, more efficient fertilizer that could contribute to a second food revolution.
Farmers often use urea, a rich source of nitrogen, as fertilizer. Its flaw, however, is that it breaks down quickly in wet soil and forms ammonia. The ammonia is washed away, creating a major environmental issue as it leads to eutrophication of water ways and ultimately enters the atmosphere as nitrogen dioxide, the main greenhouse gas associated with agriculture.
This fast decomposition also limits the amount of nitrogen that can get absorbed by crop roots and requires farmers to apply more fertilizer to boost production. However, in low-income regions where populations continue to grow and the food supply is unstable, the cost of fertilizer can hinder additional applications and cripple crop yields.
The researchers developed a simple and scalable method for coating hydroxyapatite (HA) nanoparticles with urea molecules. HA is a mineral found in human and animal tissues and is considered to be environmentally friendly. In water, the hybridization of the HA nanoparticles and urea slowly released nitrogen, 12 times slower than urea by itself. Initial field tests on rice farms showed that the HA-urea nanohybrid lowered the need for fertilizer by one-half.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Agribusiness ideas.
Popular Posts
-
Israeli gov't to fund medical cannabis research. The Ministries of Agriculture and Health will provide NIS 8 million in funding for 1...
-
Billionaire Elon Musk is known for his futuristic ideas and his latest suggestion might just save us from being irrelevant as artificial i...
-
Keeping pet trim is good for pet's health and owners' money. Feeding pets indiscriminately with food high in sugar, fat and cert...
-
Farmers, who regularly irrigate bananas, can boot the weight of the fruit by more than 30 per cent. More than 90 per cent of famers in K...
-
The regulations require producers who raise cattle, cows, pigs, chickens, turkeys and other animals to obtain a veterinarian’s approval b...
-
Across one-fourth of the globe, people aren’t getting the nutrients they need to stay healthy, according to the newly released Global Hung...
AGRIBUSINESS EDUCATION.
Translate
I-CONNECT -AGRICULTURE
AGRIBUSINESS TIPS.
AGRIBUSINESS.
The Agriculture Daily
veterinarymedicineechbeebolanle-ojuri.blogspot.com Cassava: benefits of garri as a fermented food. Cassava processing involves fermentation which is a plus for gut health. The fermentation process removes the cyanogenic glucosides present in the fres...
No comments:
Post a Comment