BIO-FERTILIZER TECHNOLOGY: A TOOL FOR AGRICULTURE, HORTICULTURE AND FORESTRY SYSTEMS

Abstract

Today our country is having a huge task of feeding about more than 100 million of our people. This task could have been impossible but for the Green Revolution of 1960 which has given reasonable hope for India being self-sufficient in the production of enough food for feeding the increasing population. Chemical fertilizers have been in the forefront of the struggle to increase the world food production. They have become vital for crop production. But the use of costly chemical fertilizers for large scale production of agricultural crops in the fields and fungicides & pesticides for preserving grains bring about physical and chemical alternations to the land, thereby bringing soil pollution. Hence, such soil pollution can be prevented by treating the soil with beneficial microbes instead of chemical fertilizers. As the first living things on the planet, microbes are crucial to preserving the ecosystem's biological balance. Plants, animals, and bacteria have formed a variety of interrelationships over a long period of time that can be classified as associative, antagonistic, commensalistic, mutualistic, pathogenic, or symbiotic. In nurseries and fields, diseases severely damage crops used in agriculture, horticulture, and forestry, reducing biomass production or destroying germplasm collections. Numerous bacterial and fungal diseases target economically significant crop plants. Microbial bio-fertilizers are utilized as biological control agents for a variety of disease-causing organisms because they can stop the spread of harmful organisms and safeguard crops in nurseries and fields. These beneficial microbes are also used for reclamation and rehabilitation of different problem soils such as wastelands, saline or salt affected lands, heavy metal contaminated lands, mined out areas, deserts, coastal sand dune and other polluted soils. This paper highlights different kinds of bio-fertilizers and their production and application methods to various crops for enhanced healthy, quality and grain yield.