ABSTRACT

Since cassava grows reasonably well in very infertile soils where other crops may not produce at all, many people believe that cassava does not respond to fertilizers or manure applications. This belief is also based on the lack of response to fertilizer applications in some trials that were conducted for 1-2 years. These results could be due to the fact that the experiments were conducted on a rather fertile soil with no specific nutritional problems, or the amount or type of fertilizers applied were not adequate to satisfy the crop’s particular nutritional requirements. However, thousands of fertilizer trials conducted by FAO throughout the world between 1961 and 1977 indicate that cassava is as responsive to fertilizer application as other crops that are traditionally fertilized, and that fertilizer application to cassava can be highly economic, as shown in Table 2 (FAO, 1980). These fertilizer experiments conducted by FAO were mostly short-term trials. These indicate that in West Africa (Ghana) cassava responded mainly to K, in Latin America (Brazil) to P and in Asia (Indonesia) to N, followed by K and P (Richards, 1979).