Field validation of Nutrient Expert for middle season rice in China

response and agronomic efficiency as compared with soil testing and farmer's practice

IPNI-2014-CHN-NEMR

22 May 2017

2016 Annual Interpretive Summary


Nutrient Expert® (NE) field validation continued for middle season rice in 2016. Field experiments were set up in Anhui and Hubei provinces of China to compare the NE-based fertilizer recommendation method to the recommendations based on soil testing, and the farmer’s practice (FP).

In Anhui, the average N-P2O5-K2O recommendations were 169-58-95 kg/ha, 194-68-92 kg/ha, and 212-72-59 kg/ha for the NE-based, the soil test-based, and the FP plots, respectively. Rice grain yield in the NE-based treatment (8.8 t/ha) was not significantly different from the soil test-based recommendation (8.7 t/ha), but both were higher than FP treatment (8.1 t/ha). The average agronomic efficiency (AE) and partial factor productivity (PFP) values of N were 14.3 kg/kg and 52.2 kg/kg in the NE-based treatment. The average AE and PFP in the soil test-based and FP treatments were 12.1 kg/kg and 45.1 kg/kg, and 8.1 kg/kg and 38.4 kg/kg, respectively.

In Hubei, the average recommendations for the NE-based plots was 155-60-52 kg/ha, for the soil test-based plots was 177-60-90 kg/ha, while the FP plots received an average of 182-88-88 kg/ha. No significant grain yield difference was observed between NE-based, soil test-based and FP (8.6 t/ha, 8.3 t/ha and 8.8 t/ha, respectively) of nutrient application. The AE and PFP values also did not show significant difference among NE, soil test and FP treatments.

The on-farm trials suggest that the NE could be used as an effective tool for providing 4R-based site-specific fertilizer recommendation when a soil test is not available or timely.