It is very difficult to sustain heavy agricultural practices with Biofertilizers as standalone products. This is mostly because biofertlizers are low in directly available NPK . In many cases biofertilizers are carrier biofertilizers, which contain micro-organims involved in the the NPK cycles. I am intrigued to know why it is difficult to develop NPK biofertilizers?
@ Arnab, it is a very good question. Actually biofertilizers are beneficial microbial inoculants mainly represent for fixing nitrogen, solubilizing or mobilizing P and solubilizing K from the native sources. Their role is to mobilize, solubilize, fixing , transporting and adsorbed the nutrients from the available sources for plant nutrition. It is difficult to develop NPK biofertilizers because very difficult to find a compatible organisms consortia that can survive and sustain higher NPK concentration in all soil conditions.
You are correct but you think about future. Bio fertilizers provide lower nutrient density than chemical fertilizers, so more product is often required for the same effect but Bio fertilizers improve the soil texture and yield of plants. They do not allow pathogens to flourish. They are eco-friendly and cost-effective. Bio fertilizers protect the environment from pollutants since they are natural fertilizers. Bio fertilizers can be difficult to store and may have a much shorter shelf-life than chemical fertilizers. The different microbial biofertilizers, including mutually supportive and free-living nitrogen-fixers, phosphorus-solubilizers, and mobilizers, as well as the formulations and applications of a few commercially available biofertilizers toward organic farming and recent efforts to develop next-generation biofertilizers.
Basically, biofertilizers are Nitrogen fixation bacteria and nutrients mobilizer e.g. (PSB) Phosphorus solubilizer bacteria, (ZSB) Zinc solubilizing bacteria, and Potassium Solubilizing bacteria.
That is all fine but, except perhaps for N, they are delivering from a finite reserve
At NTP we are all for biologicals either as stimulants or inoculants. Anything that helps aid in healthy soil and in many cases soil's return to health.
I would like to ask about supplemental N. I always thought that by adding synthetic nitrogen salts as fertilizer it was counterproductive to the microbe's health, especially at high concentrations, but would low concentrations of a non salt nitrate enhance the overall plant nutrient availability without detrimental effect to the microbes. Our understanding is that loading the soil with nitrogen fixing microbes helps, but will not be able to provide enough N to the plant to maintain yields. Any thoughts?
I completely agree with John. My concern arose from the perspective of recovering heavily degraded soil. When I am adding biological soil conditioners, containing an optimized microbial consortia, there may be bacteria of the N and P cycles. But to get the soil ready for cultivation use would take months, if not years. If I fall back to synthetic fertilizers, then the whole thing gets messed up. Hence I was curious, what one would do in such situations. @JohnIreland
Dear, Arnab Banerjee, It is an interesting and practical question in today's world. Because, with the arrival of chemical fertilizers in the field of agriculture, unfortunately, due to the lack of understanding of the process in the world's soils, the positive components of the soil decreased and the negative components that contribute to the reduction of productivity increased. However, for the introduction of this fertilizer (BioFertilizers), the process standard must be observed to create more synergy in the soil rhizosphere.
In such a situation, the positive components of the role that help increase productivity become more stable.
الاسمدة الحيوية بكتريا تعمل على تثبيت النيتروجين على سبيل المثال أو تسهل امتصاص بعض العناصر فقط.
Microbial biofertilizers may lack suitable compatibility of microorganisms in the final formulated product. These products may also suffer from shelf life constraints. Non-microbial biofertilizers may partially solve the case. However, combining the three i.e. NPK may be a challenging task in the case of non-microbial biofertilizers due to stability issue of the formulants. Most importantly, the exact assured amount of the nutrients supplied through microbial or non-microbial biofertilizers to the crops in plant available form at a particular time point is not guarantied; which is not the case in water soluble synthetic salt-based fertilizers. In all these ways, NPK biofertilizer development as well as farmers' adaptation are challenging at present.
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