Impact of Plant Nutrients on Prediction of Wheat Crop Yield from Pond Ash Amended Field by Artificial Neural Networks

Abstract

In India presently, 145 existing Thermal Power Plants (TPPs) contribute about 70% of the total energy requirement and produce approximately 184 million metric tons of fly ash per year, which is projected to exceed 440 million metric tons per annum by 2030. This quantity of fly ash generated poses significant environmental problems, besides occupying large areas of land for its dumping, requiring appropriate measures for its safe disposal and gainful utilization on sustainable basis. Based on the field demonstration work carried out on the bulk utilization of pond ash in agriculture and forestry sectors under different agro-climatic conditions and soil types for the last two decades, it has been well established that pond ash has significant potential for utilization as liming agent, soil conditioner, source of plant nutrients and also for boosting the growth and yield of a variety of crops. Some field scale studies carried out especially in the waste/alkaline lands of State Agriculture Research Farm and farmers’ fields are discussed in the present paper for the development of artificial neural network (ANN) for the correlation of crop yields and plant nutrients. As such, the influence of major plant nutrients viz. N, P, K, Ca, Mg and S on the yield of wheat crops cultivated in different soil types and agro-climatic conditions is discussed. Furthermore, an attempt has also been made to develop a three-layer feed-forward artificial neural network (ANN) model. Satisfactorily enough, it has been found that the predictions of the developed ANN model are in quite good qualitative and quantitative agreement with the experimental results.