Marking a major advance in improving crop health and nutrition worldwide, the Consortium for Precision Crop Nutrition (CPCN) and Agmatix launched a unique global platform designed to drive international research collaboration and expand open access to crop nutrient data to farmers, their advisers and policy makers.
The online platform, powered by the Agmatix Insights solution and spearheaded by CPCN in collaboration with several leading research institutes, enables open access to essential crop nutrient concentrations data.
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The platform, which comprises two active databases, serves as a critical open data resource for agricultural researchers and professionals who conduct field trials on soil fertility and crop nutrition. Enabling these users to both contribute to and benefit from the datasets, the platform has already resulted in a published paper that estimates nutrient use and storage in maize.
Developed in partnership with the International Fertilizer Association (IFA) and Wageningen University & Research (WUR), the first of the two databases looks at production and environmental factors affecting nutrient concentrations to determine the total amount of nutrients removed from the field in the harvested portion of the crop. This provides agronomists and farm advisors with the information needed to improve their plant nutrition plans, delivering key efficiencies and critical yield increases. Focused initially on nutritionally and industrially important crops, such as maize, wheat, rice and soybean, the Global Crop Nutrient Removal Database includes data on nutrient content, residues, crop yields and other associated data.
The second resource, The Nutrient Omission Trial Database, is focused on crop nutrient requirements. Created in collaboration with the IFA, the African Plant Nutrition Institute (APNI), and Innovative Solutions for Decision Agriculture, this database includes data from researchers and institutes around the globe. It aims to support site-specific recommendations on optimizing nutrient management by enabling researchers to compare crop nutrient requirements and plans.
“The information collected via this database will be invaluable in improving our understanding of ongoing trends in crop nutrient uptake and removal,” explains Achim Dobermann, IFA Chief Scientist. “This will make it easier to create decision support systems to determine how to optimize crop production in a sustainable way, under changing environmental conditions, ultimately facilitating positive long-term changes in how these processes are managed across the industry.”