ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the advances in fertilizers, particularly new products and their application and management. A commercial fertilizer is a material that contains at least one of the plant nutrients in chemical form that, when applied to the soil, is soluble in the soil solution phase and assimilable by or “available” to plant roots. In the context of agriculture, fertilizer is seen as a commodity that is produced, transported and marketed by global private companies. In Europe a combination of balanced fertilizer application and management more than doubled cereal yield per unit fertilizer-N. The briquette application is backbreaking work, as it involves applying the briquets by hand; however, briquets are applied once during the planting season compared with two to three applications using conventional fertilizers. Stabilized nitrogen fertilizers are compounds that prevent or suppress the transformation of amide-N in urea to ammonium hydroxide and ammonium through the action of the enzyme urease.
