Know the Exact Requirements of Water and Nutrients

Posted by Md Khann on December 15th, 2020

Plants, like humans, must be well-nourished so that they do not get sick and can give the best of themselves. For this, it is important in the case of crops to plan fertilization, irrigation, and drainage in great detail.

It is not just about putting fertilizer, it is about giving them the right minerals and at the right time to ensure the best development of the plant. Nor is it a matter of giving fertilizer in large quantities to ensure large productions, this is not true, it is a question of giving it what is adequate for the best development and so that the investment in fertilizer produces the greatest benefits and does not represent an excessive cost unnecessarily.

On the other hand, the plant requires a lot of water. On average 80 to 90 percent of the weight of a plant is water. Therefore, the plants need watering if the rain does not provide enough. Like the fertilizer, we must give it only the required water, not more.

Importance of Plants in Urban Areas Nutritional Content of plants

An excess of water generally produces root problems or sometimes poor growth, so it is necessary to use drains to evacuate the water when it rains more than the water required by the crop or not to provide excess water for irrigation.

A lack of water reduces the growth of the crop and the production potential that these have.

An excess of a fertilizer, in addition to increasing production costs, can cause nutritional imbalances in the plant, or imbalances in the relationships of nutrients in the soil or in the substrate. An imbalance causes one nutrient to be absorbed more than another by the plant and this, in turn, causes problems in the development and growth of the plant. Another consequence of excess fertilizer causes an increase in the number of salts in the roots, remember that fertilizers are salts, as salts accumulate in the roots cause burns at the tips of the roots, limiting growth, water absorption, and nutrients as well as opening the possibility that fungi or nematodes attack the root more easily.

The lack of fertilizer can be evidenced in the plant in different ways, but it will depend on how many nutrients the soil has available where it grows. A plant that does not have the number of nutrients necessary for its optimal development, will present problems in growth and low production, in addition, some plants can be yellow, purple, or white in some of their leaves.

Fertilizer and water requirements are not all the same for different crops or types of soil or substrates in which the plant's root develops.

Even during the development of a crop the amounts of fertilizers and water change. In other words, it is not the same amount of water or fertilizer that a crop requires when it has 3 or 4 leaves as when it is in full production.

Some important points to consider when knowing the amount of water and fertilizer needed for a crop is the amount of production expected and the sowing density, since the amounts of water and fertilizer are totally dependent on the number of tons of product that is planned to be harvested in a given area.

There are information tables that indicate, for such a quantity of harvested production, so many Kilograms of fertilizers are necessary. In the same way for water.

In addition to this information, the nutrient absorption curves for each crop should be consulted, these are, for example, the diets that nutritionists give us to have a good diet in our lives. These curves indicate how much nutrient is needed at each stage of the crop. In the same way, there are Kc, these are numbers that help us calculate the amount of water that a crop requires in each stage of it. Following the example of human beings, the Kc data is one of the elements that would be used to know how many glasses of water we need to drink per day in childhood, adolescence, maturity, or old age. The following figure shows an example of a table with Kc from different crops.

Nutritional Content of plants

It should be taken into account that not only the above data are required to properly calculate the nutrition and irrigation of a plantation. Knowing the type of soil, or substrate, its chemical and physical characteristics, as well as the climate or environmental conditions, are essential. In addition, we must consider how they will be applied since this increases or decreases the final amount of fertilizer or water that is available to the plant.                        

A Good Agricultural Practice will always be to have and use information about the fertilizer and water needs of our crop to calculate and apply what the plant really needs.

One of the ways to ensure that a plant is being properly nourished is by performing foliar analyzes, if what we want to check is whether the amount of water is adequate, we can use soil moisture content meters such as tensiometers or gypsum blocks. The following figure shows that it is a tensiometer.

In summary, the tensiometer is a way of measuring the amount of water in the soil, generating a balance between the water that is inside the tensiometer and the soil, through the ceramic capsule. The loss of water inside the tensiometer generates a vacuum that modifies the pressure gauge, when the pressure gauge marks values ​​close to 0 the ground is found with an adequate amount of water, as the values ​​in the pressure gauge increase it indicates that it has been losing water from the ground.

Good agricultural practice is to have the information necessary to calculate the nutrient and water requirements of a crop. In this way, fertilization and irrigation can be planned and controlled, supplying what is necessary for the crop. This enables us to obtain healthy plants and good productions.

Sometimes, mainly during the rainy season in some growing areas, the amount of rain exceeds the needs of the crops, causing what was mentioned above when overwatering. When it rains more than necessary, the water accumulates in the land, so we must give the crop drainage to keep the soil free of excess water. This action is called draining or needing to make drains.

When the soil has excess water it lacks oxygen because the empty spaces are occupied by water and not oxygen. When the plant does not have available oxygen for the root, it tends to rot or predispose it to become ill due to rotting caused by fungi or bacteria, all this produces losses of plants that in turn had a production potential and therefore a projected income.

It is important to identify the areas of the farm that have problems of flooding or retention of water in the soil, either my own experiences or through a study of the movement of water in these soils, in addition, the resistance of the soil must be considered. plants that we grow to lack oxygen in the root.

With this information and considering the level curves of the land, the need for drainage should be planned, designed, and carried out, seeking to evacuate the excess water that is deposited in certain places.

It must be taken into account not to cause irreversible damage to the land and it must also be taken into account not to cause erosion problems due to the effect of drainage.

As can be seen, this is drainage, which helps to quickly evacuate the water from this coffee plantation when it rains a lot, but also because there is a certain unevenness in favor of the slope below where the water was pooled, a natural barrier is placed to prevent draining water from causing other problems.