Nutrient Expert®: Making Better Fertilizer Use Decisions

The preferred method for making fertilizer recommendations is to analyze soils to determine if an adequate nutrient supply exists to support healthy crop growth. However, most farmers in India lack knowledge about managing nutrients within their highly nutrient demanding cereal systems. The IPNI South Asia Program developed and adapted Nutrient Expert® (NE), a decision support software system that provides fertilizer recommendations, for individual maize farmers. Across all of the maize-growing sites, the performance of NE was consistently superior to the other alternatives.