that is a good question

Dear Stuart,

for a rapid estimation of nutrients in plant tissue you may use two technologies:

A) NIR or MIR for total N (..., C, and organic compounds) and

B) X-Ray Fluorescence Analyzer (XFA) for total P, K, Mg etc.

Some standard methods often used to analyse plant tissue for their nutrient concentrations:

http://plantstress.com/methods/Handbook_of_Reference_Methods_for_Plant_Analysis%201998.pdf

http://www.fao.org/docrep/011/i0131e/i0131e00.htm

See also one of my publications/supplementary material: Article Application of biochars to sandy and silty soil failed to in...

and Cornelisson et al 2003 for sampling and sample preparation https://www.uv.es/jgpausas/papers/Cornelissen%20et%20al%202003%20handbook.pdf

Best regards

Nils

Thanks Nils,

I’m working my way through the documents you linked now. I don’t suppose you could recommend any brands for the equipment you spoke of? For grain analysis we’re looking at Foss Analytics and Perten but I don’t know much about kit for tissue analysis. I’m reading about the chemical analysis methods but it looks as though we‘d still need quite a lot of equptment for that too. I need to compare costs, accuracy, ease, speed etc.

Thanks :)

Hello Stuart,

I recommend investing in VisNIR or MIRS and XFA. For sample preparation you just need an oven (...for plant tissue 60 degree celsius degree and for soil up to 105 degree celcius, e.g. Memmert) and a mill (e.g. Retsch MM200). Establishing a laboratory for plant tissue analysis is expensive, time consuming, and challanging as you have to ensure security and high GLP/QM standards. Thus, I recommend to send aliquots of your samples to a certified service provider for analysis of total N, K, P etc.. After getting results you can start to calibrate, validate etc. your NIR, MIRS, and XFA to develop methods for rapid estimation of nutrients.

BR

Nils