Impact of Hydrogel on Agriculture – A review

Abstract

Water is one of the most essential natural resource, which is often costly and limiting particularly in arid and semi arid regions. Under climatic changing scenario, fresh water resources at global level is synchronizing day by day and creating water scarcity and transforming more irrigated area to rainfed. The use of water holding amendments like hydrogel polymer enhancing the water and nutrient use efficiency and will become more important over time, especially in arid and semi arid region. Hydrogel has unique characteristics that it retains water and nutrient from their surrounding area and will help in alleviating moisture stress of crop plants during prolonged dry period and where irrigation facilities are available this technology could reduce the number of irrigation applied to crops. The dose of hydrogel as suggested in the literature varies from 2.5 to 5 kg/ha depending on the soil texture. A lower dose is recommended for clayey soil while a higher dose is recommended for sandy soil. Nowadays water management is considered as one of the biggest challenge in arid and semi arid region of world, in fact by 2030 global water demand probably to be 50% higher than today, resulting in water scarcity. Many research finding confirmed that hydrogel not only used for saving of water/irrigation, but also have tremendous potential to improve the physical and biological properties of soil. In this paper, responses of hydrogel polymers on various crops are reviewed.