Fertilization and irrigation - Become an expert

Explore essential plant nutrients and how soil and water management underpin fertilization and irrigation strategies. Learn how potential yields are shaped by limiting factors and the law of the minimum.

Learn about essential plant nutrients, including macro, secondary, and micronutrients, their uptake from the soil solution, mobility in the plant, and fertigation-based fertilisation strategies.

Learn how soil structure, texture, and cation exchange capacity govern nutrient availability from the soil solution, and how organic matter, pH, and nutrient forms affect fertilization and irrigation.

Learn how irrigation water quality affects crops, soils, and irrigation systems. Explore water sources—groundwater, surface water, wastewater, desalination—and key parameters such as EC, TDS, pH, hardness, alkalinity, SAR.

Explore soil salinity, its primary and secondary causes, and how to measure it with EC and saturated paste extract, then manage impacts with leaching, irrigation design, and gypsum amendments.

Interpret soil and tissue test results to gauge a crop’s current nutritional status, considering soil analysis methods and lab variability. Use proper sampling and consistent approaches to inform fertilizer decisions.

Learn to design fertilization plans and nutrient recommendations for soil-grown crops using build-up and maintenance and sufficiency approaches, and evaluate base cation saturation and quantitative methods.

Explore fertigation, delivering fertilizers through irrigation water—primarily drip systems—to improve nutrient accuracy, timing, and root-zone uptake while managing solubility, compatibility, and injector systems.

Explore soil water status, porosity, and volumetric water content to determine field capacity, wilting point, and available water; apply evapotranspiration-based irrigation planning and infiltration considerations.

Design and analyze irrigation systems for crops, using drip and micro irrigation and sprinklers, while considering soil texture, root depth, water requirements, flow rate, uniformity, and scheduling.