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

Imbalanced nutrient application and excessive use of N have presented a great challenge to North-central China in recent years. These practices have resulted in losses of yield and profits for farmers, and caused detrimental environmental effects. A fertilizer recommendation based on Nutrient Expert (NE) was developed considering crop responses to nutrient applied and the maintenance of soil nutrients to obtain both high yield and environmental protection. On-farm experiments with summer maize at 33 farmer fields in Xinji, Hebei, tested the hypothesis that maize yields, profit, nutrient uptake, and fertilizer efficiency can be improved through a NE-based fertilizer recommendation. In this study, we evaluated the performance of NE management using 135-52-60 kg N-P₂O₅-K₂O/ha compared to the prevailing and imbalanced farmer practice (FP) of applying 235-6-0 kg N-P₂O₅-K₂O/ha.

The NE treatments produced a 7.9 t/ha grain yield average and a net profit over fertilizer cost of USD 2,014/ha, which was not significantly different than the 7.8 t/ha and USD 2,028/ha obtained under FP. However, NE management achieved higher N use efficiency parameters such as N recovery efficiency (22%), partial productivity of N (58.4 kg/kg), and agronomic efficiency of N (8.4 kg/kg), than those with FP (i.e., 11%, 33.2 kg/kg, and 4.5 kg/kg).

The Nutrient Expert-based fertilizer recommendation not only maintained high grain yields, but also improved N use efficiency, which is especially beneficial to the environment. Hebei-NMBF