View article

The modern agricultural practices intensively use agrochemicals to increase crop yield resulting into hike in cost of farming. Fertilizers are one of the major agrochemicals used to boost crop yield. However, a significant amount of applied chemical fertilizers in the fields is lost due to various abiotic and biotic factors including photolysis, volatilization, leaching, hydrolysis and microbial immobilization. These factors reduce the nutrient use efficiency (NUE) and increase the frequency of fertilizer application. Current agricultural practices are ineffective at concurrently boosting nutrient use efficiency and agriculture productivity. The losses of fertilizers at ground level may be minimized by controlling the nutrient release kinetics through anchoring the nutrient with an appropriate porous carrier material.

Slow-release fertilizers (SRFs) smartly deliver nutrients to the plants at a relatively slow rate for better synchronization of …