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A farmer walking through a green field with a herd of cows

Special Collections

Special Collections

Soil fertility

Soil fertility, fertilizers, and crop nutrition: Past, present, and future

March 8, 2025

Society has made (and will be making) significant demands on agriculture in the not-to-distant future. Meeting future sustainability goals and environmental regulations while simultaneously continuing to meet requirements for food, feed, fuel, and fiber requires a firm understanding of how “we” have collectively arrived at our current status as it relates to our fertility principles and beliefs as well as the processes that address them. We have advanced far from the earliest thoughts on rudimentary plant nutrition to a sophisticated science of prescription crop nutrition.