Nutrient Management and Optimized Fertilization on Wheat and Maize in Henan Province

This study was conducted to validate Nutrient Expert (NE)-based fertilizer recommendations for winter wheat and spring maize in farmer fields and compare them with farmer fertilizer practice (FFP). For this, thirty (30) on-farm experiments were conducted for wheat and 12 for maize in Zhumadian, Henan province. NE-based fertilizer recommendation plots received on average 154-78-79 kg N-P₂O₅-K₂O/ha for wheat and 150-50-62 kg N-P₂O₅-K₂O/ha for maize, respectively, while farmer fertilizer practice (FFP) plots received an average of 249-119-119 kg N-P₂O₅-K₂O/ha for wheat and 206-15-15 kg N-P₂O₅-K₂O/ha for maize, respectively.

First year results of the study showed that grain yields and profits in NE were both higher than those in FFP treatments. However, significantly higher agronomic efficiency of N (16.6 kg/kg for wheat and 18.4 kg/kg for maize), N recovery efficiency (52.9% for wheat and 43.0% for maize), and partial factor productivity (52.0 kg/kg for wheat and 53.0 kg/kg for maize) were obtained using NE-based fertilizer recommendations than using FFP, where the corresponding FFP values were 9.7 kg/kg and 12.7 kg/kg, 18.6% and 25.2%, and 31.5 kg/kg and 38 kg/kg for wheat and maize, respectively. With NE, 38.2% and 25.2% less fertilizer N was used than that used in FFP for wheat and maize, respectively. The study demonstrated that NE was an effective fertilizer recommendation method in Henan. Henan-NMBF