Does Soil Testing For Fertiliser Recommendation Fall Short of A Soil Health Card? - Does Soil Testing For Fertiliser Recommendation Fall Short of A Soil Health Card? - Open Access Pub

Nutrient depletion and imbalanced use of fertiliser nutrients, inappropriate tillage and rain- water management practices often result in land degradation. Declining soil health contributes to climate change through loss in soil productivity, biodiversity, soil carbon, and moisture and ecosystem services. In order to address declining soil health, government of India has launched a soil health card (SHC) scheme aimed at need base use of chemical fertilisers. The paper points out the short-comings in the SHC scheme. Balanced and need base use of chemical fertilizers can be helpful in environmental protection and restoring soil health. The paper identifies potential agronomic practices and production management systems that can reduce our dependence on synthetic nutrients. Integration of soil fertility management domains with computer based QUEFT crop model has the potential of making fertiliser recommendations more domain and crop specific and less cumbersome. For soil health assessment chemical indicators must be integrated with physical and biological properties of the soils which can be predicted through reflectance spectroscopy. For assessing soil health related issues across different agro-ecoregions, there is however an urgent need for building-up more robust soil reflectance libraries. DOI10.14302/issn.2639-3166.jar-18-2496 Agricultural policies associated with the Green Revolution have played a dominant role in enhancing the production of chemical fertilizers for meeting the nutrient needs of crops to boost their productivity. Green Revolution era shaped agronomic research, much of which was singularly focused on use of chemical fertilizers to harness the potential of the new improved cultivars. In our zeal to enhance total production, we grossly overlooked the need for balanced use of N:P:K fertilisers and the importance of regulatory functions of soils. Subsidies on chemical fertiliser nutrients promoted not only over-use but also their imbalanced use and discouraged farmers to use bulky organic manures. Farmers have further resorted to crop residues burning to enable easy intensification of the cropping systems. As a management practice, residue burning may hasten decline in quality of soil organic matter (SOM), the major soil ingredient facilitating soil aggregation and structural stability1,2,3. Decline in SOM also reduces the ability of soils to absorb and retain soil moisture4,5 and sustain biotic activity that make soils a life-giving entity. The extensive and elaborate matrix of soil microorganisms and other life forms are known to