Chemical Problems in Crop Production

Abstract

The classic chemical problems in crop production centre round the feeding of plants.It was in 1840 that Liebig by chemical reasoning and Lawes by empirical trials applied in practice the knowledge gained by plant physiologists about the nutrition of plants.Up to that time many agriculturists.knowing nothing about the scientific evidence to the contry.had assumed that plants feed on the organic matter in soil.Liebig in his vigorous writings showed them that this was not so:he pieced together the scientific knowledge and give a convincing picure of the plant deriving most of its food from the air in the form of carbon dieoxide and oxygenand the reminder from the soil,water and simple compounds of nitrogen,phosphorus,sulphur.calcium, pottassium,magnesium,iron and other elements.These are then built up into the complex carbohydrates.proteins and other substances which finally form the plant tissues.Liebig argued that the soil resources could be increased by the addition of the appropriate chemical compounds.and Lawes showed how to do it:he ste up experimental fields at Rothamsted and a factory in London.thus starting the artificial fertiliser industrywhich has now grown to such enormous dimensions that some 35 to 40 million tons are made annually in the different countries of the world.There are many technical problems connected with the industry that could profitably be discussed.but I shall confine myself to those relating to the agricultural side.For many years these were mainly concerned with showing how to fit the fertilisers into everyyday farm use.The results were very striking.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.29321/MAJ.10.002150

Pages

219 - 224

Creative Commons

Copyright

© The Author(s), 2026. Published by Madras Agricultural Students' Union in Madras Agricultural Journal (MAJ). This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited by the user.

Keywords