"Less fertilizer" means using a smaller amount of material used to help plants grow and be healthy.
Full definition
They can also grow on marginal lands
with less fertilizer and water, making it less likely they will compete with food production.
Despite using nearly 90
percent less fertilizer, corn and soybean yields increased, soil quality improved, and soil erosion decreased by 25 percent, all without decreasing profitability.
Farmers can grow these with
much less fertilizer or irrigation — and unlike corn, they can be grown almost anywhere, even on idle or degraded land.
In both the developed and developing worlds, these farmers rapidly rebuilt the fertility of their degraded soil, which then allowed them to maintain high yields using
far less fertilizer and fewer pesticides.
«Simply by
adding less fertilizer, he did not reduce his yields, he saved some on fertilizer costs and he garnered the credits that can be sold for additional income,» Robertson said.
Just a
tad less fertilizer on Midwestern farms could lead to big drops in nitrogen pollution in the Mississippi River without sacrificing crop yields, a new study shows.
Reeves says CIMMYT is already preparing a new planting technique called «bed planting» that requires 30 %
less fertilizer for the same yields.
Relative to corn, grasses
require less fertilizer, less tilling (which helps release carbon stored in the soil into the air), and store more of their carbon underground.
An AeroFarm uses 95 percent less water than a field farm, 40
percent less fertilizer than traditional farming, and no pesticides.
I was at Aldo Leopold's «Shack» in Baraboo, Wis.; at the World Food Prize Foundation conference in Des Moines; and then out in the fields of Ames, Iowa, where a sustainable - agriculture team at Iowa State University is showing how to grow bountiful crops of soybeans and corn with
far less fertilizer and pesticide than is used in the standard industrial - style pattern of planting.
He managed to hack bacteria so they would perform a vital service for young rice plants, helping them utilize nitrogen and grow more efficiently
with less fertilizer.
While 2008 had horrible floods in the midwest, we still produced the second largest corn crop on record, while
using less fertilizer than previous years, due to more efficient planting and growing methods,
Nutiva is focused on regenerative agriculture so it can sequester carbon from the atmosphere and oceans, putting it into the soil so the soil can hold more water, use
less fertilizer and enhance nutritional elements in foods.
Green Super Rice is actually a mix of more than 250 different potential rice varieties and hybrids variously adapted to difficult growing conditions such as drought and low inputs, including no pesticide and
less fertilizer, and with rapid establishment rates to out - compete weeds, thus reducing the need for herbicides.
The cause of the yield stagnation has not yet been explained but is probably due to a variety of factors: «Following the introduction of new priorities with the joint EU agricultural policy of the 1990s, among other things,
less fertilizer was used and leguminous plants were often omitted from crop rotation cycles,» explains Wiesmeier's co-author Dr. Rico Hübner from the Chair for Strategic Landscape Planning and Management, also in Weihenstephan.
In that vein, feedlot operations could be more environmentally friendly if they used
less fertilizers and cover crops in the grain production component for their feed.
The combined traits enable Buck to achieve high yields and flourish with
less fertilizer and water than its more familiar naked cousin, wheat.
Farmers in the U.S. and China should use
less fertilizer, freeing it up for application where such nutrients can do the most good
Healthy topsoil and stubble — the foot or so of a plant left standing after the previous year's crop has been harvested — act like a canopy of mulch, retaining both moisture and nutrients while preventing soil erosion, all with
less fertilizer than before.
Less fertilizer use also has an economic impact.
The alteration, which can be achieved with chemical fungicide treatments or by manipulating the plant's genes, should allow the plant to reach maturity with less water,
less fertilizer and less risk of damage from wind, hail, drought or other acts of nature.
From this library of genes, Jones is working to create new varieties that would continue to allow big harvests while needing much
less fertilizer.
«To add that much
less fertilizer and still get 80 % of the conventional yields is outstanding.»
Crops that produce more nitrogen will require
less fertilizer, thus lowering production costs and reducing the potential for runoff that can impact the environment, according to Subramanian.
The most recent breakthrough was made by a team of British and American biologists who report they've successfully infused tobacco plants with bacterial genes — a first step towards engineering crops that grow faster, offer higher yields and use
less fertilizers.
Using CRISPR, researchers can select hardier wild rice varieties that require
less fertilizer or have a natural pest resistance, and turn off the one «seed shattering» gene that has made them undesirable to growers.
New rice varieties that will enable growing of the crop with less pesticides,
less fertilizers and less water have showed yields of 20 - 30 times more than traditional ones under trials on farmers» fields.
Perennial crops would require
less fertilizer, less equipment and fuel to replant each season, and would provide year - round ground cover.
Aerofarms» third and largest farm in the city houses 30 crop harvests a year, compared to the two to three typical of your standard farm, all the while using 50 percent
less fertilizer and 95 percent less water.
Dwarf wheat and semi-dwarf wheat crops have replaced their taller cousins, and these wheat strains require less time and
less fertilizer to produce a robust crop of wheat berries.
Cynthia Ringgold, however, notes that the development has imported a special hybrid grass from the U.S., called Paspalum, which requires 50 %
less fertilizers, pesticides and irrigation.
It also requires far
less fertilizers and pesticides to grow.
A shift to diets that use
less fertilizer, such as vegetarian diets, or genetically modified organisms like C4 rice, can also reduce pressure on the supply chain while the technology is in transition.
Along with «exponentially higher» yields, the CropBox promises that their complete growing system also uses 90 % less water and 80 %
less fertilizer than conventional agriculture does.
And oft - criticized Monsanto, he added, «is investing in developing crop genetics that are more climate resilient and require
less fertilizer.»