ABSTRACT

Plant growth and crop production depend, to a large extent, on soil nutrient supply capacity. The most effective, and perhaps the cheapest, means of improving soil fertility and nutrient supplying capacity is to apply additional nutrients through fertilization. For sustainable agriculture, the most important and the most effective approach is maintenance of high soil fertility and productivity. For sustainable agriculture, attention has to be focused on reverting to planting of legumes, including rotating them in a cropping sequence, planting them alone as green manure or forages, or interplanting them with grain or oil-bearing crops. For comprehensive management of nutrients in dryland areas, several considerations have been proposed, including further improvement of fertilization, crop rotation with legumes, full use of biological materials as nutrient sources, and improving soil physical, chemical, and biological properties for healthy growth of plants and for better use of nutrients.