Nitrogen from the atmosphere to the crop

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
During the middle decades of this century large-scale intensive agriculture relied heavily on the availability of cheap synthetic nitrogenous fertilisers. Little attention then had to be paid to the cost of the energy involved in the manufacture and use of fertilisers, but in recent years this factor has become of major importance. This article reviews the practical implications of the energetics of chemical and biological fixation of nitrogen and the utilisation of nitrogen by various crop plants. It reaches a number of interesting conclusions, including one that even if biotechnology made nitrogen-fixing cereals available, they would not necessarily be competitive with normal cereals produced by traditional methods. This is, however, not necessarily true of grass.

This publication has 5 references indexed in Scilit: