Field validation of Nutrient Expert Soybean in China
Nutrient Expert Soybean was developed to evaluate and validate fertilizer recommendation method based yield response and agronomic efficiency as compared with soil testing and farmer's practice.
IPNI-2014-CHN-NES
22 May 2017
2016 Annual Interpretive Summary
The objective of this study was to understand the effect of Nutrient Expert® (NE)-based fertilizer recommendation, in combination with rhizobium culture seed treatment, on soybean yield and nitrogen use efficiency in Heilongjiang, Jilin, and Liaoning provinces in China. The study had five on-farm validation experiments in the three provinces. Each individual site had a site-specific NE-based recommendation, with and without rhizobium seed treatment, and a control plot with no fertilizer application. The average nutrient application rates were 33-62-64 kg N-P2O5-K2O/ha for NE treatment, and 23-62-64 kg/ha for the NE-based treatment in combination with rhizobium seed treatment.
The field plots using NE-based fertilizer recommendations along with rhizobium seed treatment produced the highest grain yield of 3,504 kg/ha, which was 12%, 27%, and 37% higher than only NE-based recommendation (3,138 kg/ha), rhizobium seed treatment alone (2,761 kg/ha), and control (2,551 kg/ha) treatments. The agronomic efficiency (AE) and partial factor productivity (PFP) of N for NE plus rhizobium seed treatment (27 and 202 kg/kg) were significantly higher than the NE treatment (6 and 109 kg/kg) without rhizobium.
On-farm results in 2016 indicated that NE-based recommendations, combined with the rhizobium seed treatment can improve soybean grain yield and nitrogen use efficiency.