Decision System for Recommended Fertilization

and Nutrient Management in Farmland

Yunlong Liu Research Center of Urban Ecology and Environment

Shanghai Normal University Shanghai, P.R.China

Liu_zju@yahoo.com.cn

Lina Jiang Soil and Fertilizer Institute

Zhejiang Academy of Agricultural Science Hangzhou, P.R.China

tfsjfz@zaas.org

Abstract: Fertilization is the important method to enhance agricultural production, but over application and low utilization rate of fertilizers had not only increased agriculture cost and resource waste, but also caused pollution. With consideration of the disperse farmland management and fertilizer status in south China, the information technology and recommended fertilizer model had been integrated to develop soil nutrient management and decision system in Dushu village, Donghu town, Shaoxing, Zhejiang Province. The whole process of farmland nutrient management had been realized in the village information system with the specific field as basic management unit, it could be used to query farmland nutrient, to browse soil nutrient and make recommended fertilization for many crops.

Keywords: GIS; recommended fertilization; decision system; nutrient management

I. INTRODUCTION Fertilization is the important method to enhance

agricultural production, it consumes most funds in agriculture, but over application and low utilization rate of fertilizers had not only increased agriculture cost and resource waste, but also caused pollution, the main sources of non-point pollution of waters. It is very important to improve the management of soil nutrient and fertilization for sustainable agriculture in China. Besides improper fertilization, poor management and technology in soil nutrient, shortage of knowledge about soil nutrient spatial variation and relatively big errors of recommended fertilization are the main causes of low utilization rate of fertilization. Ignoring soil fertilization measurement and evaluation, the traditional agricultural fertilization was implemented by individual experience without concepts of computed fertilization. Especially favor for N fertilization, ignoring application of P and K fertilizer caused improper proportion of N, P, K fertilization and could not satisfy crop growth requirement, contrarily polluted the environment. one of the important ways to reduce the pollution of agricultural fertilization and control non-point pollution is to make fertilization decision based on knowledge of soil basic fertility and the rule of crop fertilizer requirement.

With the development of modern information technology, the precision agriculture is the most advanced agriculture

product technology in the world, accordingly the precision nutrient management theory and technology had been developed. That is, to set up soil nutrient information system and to make precision management and recommended fertilization in the relatively homogeneous basic operation cell, thus greatly improved the resource utilized ratio and reduce environment pollution. Precision nutrient management becomes the basic of modern fertilization technology development. Differing from agriculture precision nutrient management system organized by large farm in developed country, the agriculture production is organized by individual farmer, the plot for agriculture is smaller than 0.1-0.2ha, most of agriculture production was done by manual operation. It shows that the precision nutrient management theory and technology is limited by the dispersive agriculture production and management style. Soil nutrient information division management should be applied to solve the problem between over dispersive agriculture production and precision agriculture technology. Compared with traditional fertilization technology, the soil nutrient management by division will greatly improved the application of modern information technology and computer recommended fertilization. It is important to develop the soil nutrient management theory, and improve the veracity of recommended fertilization in china. It had been taken as example to create agriculture soil nutrient management and recommended fertilization spatial decision system in Dushu village, Donghu town, Shaoxing county, Zhejiang Province.

II. STUDY AREA AND DATA SOURCE

Study area The Dushu village is located within Shaoxing county,

Zhejiang Province, the approximate geographical position is 120°39.21′E, 30°00.18′N. Dushu has a total area of 73 ha with 1916 population. Soils are developed on marine sediments, the dominant soil is Fluvo aquic paddy soil, soil texture is silty clay. Base on 1:5000 digital maps, a total of 205 sites were selected for soil sampling following a simple regular sampling plan, in which the sampling points are an regular grid according to 50 × 50 m that allow geostatistical analysis (Fig.1). Representative soil samples were collected at 0-20 cm depth,

Supported by Leading Academic Discipline Project of Shanghai Municipal Education Commission (J50402) and Key Technologies R & DProgram of NingBo,ZheJiang (2008C50016).

each sample was a mixture of 3 soil cores from the grid, the central point position was recorded with a GPS device.

Data Acquisition Soil N, P, K, Ca, Mg, S, Cu, Zn, Te, Mn, B, SOM, pH,

and AA was measured by Agro-Services International Inc(ASI) method. GIS coverages, including 1:5000 topography map, major roads, rivers, field map, are collected. Other data such as agriculture survey, crop nutrient deficiency diagnosis, soil nutrient management, recommended fertilization, social economy, are also reviewed and incorporated in to the database.

III. DECISION SYSTEM DESIGN

Design Goals The overall objective of this design is to develop an

agricultural nutrient management and spatial decision system for recommended fertilization with the support of GIS technology. The available data, including basic maps, measured data and survey data, are collected to create

agriculture nutrient basic database. GIS coverages, agriculture nutrient management module, recommended fertilization module and plant nutrient deficiency diagnosis module will be integrated based on object-oriented and database interface technology. The decision system will provide the ability to assess soil nutrient status and make the recommended fertilization decision.

According to the current status of agriculture nutrient management and fertilization, decision system of agriculture nutrient management and recommended fertilization are created to improve agriculture nutrient management. A versatile set of components in the decision system are designed to provide the ability to improve rural ecological environment status and reduce agriculture non-point pollution, including data collection, data analysis, model management, agriculture nutrient evaluation and crop nutrient deficiency diagnosis. The basic design framework is shown in Fig. 2.

Recommended fertilization model ASI nutrient classification method

The soil nutrient content can be derived from the database, ASI nutrient classification indexes are used to give evaluation

Fig 1 The distribution map of soil sampling sites in Dushu village

Fertilizing Model

Geodatabase

Text Data

Graphic

Attribute Data

Graphical User Interface

Comprehensive Evaluation

Field Nutrient Management

Crop Nutrient Deficiency Diagnosis

ASI Nutrient Classification Method

Nutrient Balance Method

Dissimilar Subtraction Method of Soil

Fig 2 The structure for agriculture recommended fertilization system

about soil nutrient status, the recommended fertilization scheme can be make by the crop fertilizing amount with moderate nutrient conditions, modified by fertilization coefficient. The recommended fertilizing amount can be made for nearly 20 kinds of crops, such as rice, wheat, sugarcane, etc.

Nutrient balance method

Based on the specific field nutrient data, the recommended fertilization can be made by fertilizer requirement of crops, target yield, soil nutrient supply, modified by utilization rate of fertilizer, adjustment coefficient of crop growth and land use coefficient. The recommended fertilization schemes include the varieties, quality and proportion of required fertilizer to achieve target yield.

Dissimilar Subtraction Method of Soil Fertility

Based on the specific field soil nutrient status, Soil nitrogen requirement can be determined by crop yield, Soil phosphorus and potassium requirement can be determined by soil nutrient deficiency status. The recommended fertilization system can make calculation about the nutrient content in organic fertilizer and the application amount of fertilizer.

Integrated System The integration architecture is shown in Fig. 3. The main

components of the system are the commercial software Arcview, a geodatabase, the Recommended fertilizing model. The relation database management system is used as the platform to manage the attribute data, including social, economy, encironment and soil data. MapObjects, which is a collection of software components with GIS functionality and programmable interfaces, is used to incorporate graphical data, including shape files, SDE map layers, Arc/Info Coverages and other different format files. Based on the COM (Microsoft Component Object Model) protocol allowing easy extension of GIS base functionality, MapObjects can be used by many programming design languages to provide the interface to show the map and realize GIS map-making. Visual Basic was used as Secondary Development programming language to realize the integration of GIS, recommended fertilization model and other modules. The integrated module is

responsible for configuration and transfer of data between the geodatabase and recommended fertilizing models.

IV. DECISION SYSTEM FUNCTIONS

Data management The geography basic graphical data and the relation

database can be managed effectively by the recommended fertilization system, including data incorporation, adding, deleting, modifying and data linkage between the graphical and attribute data, etc.

Information inquiry There are two tools available for the information inquiry-

select by point location, by query condition. Selecting by the point location allows the user to inquire by clicking the point, line and polygon in the map, the point inquires results in the corresponsive attribute information. Selecting by query condition allows the user to make inquire under different conditions, the query results are high lighted in the map (Fig. 4).

Nutrient management and evaluation The soil nutrient status can be preliminary assessed by

statistics analysis of soil nutrient data. The spatial distribution map of the soil nutrients can be derived by means of the universal kriging interpolation (Fig. 5).

Recommended fertilization The recommended fertilizing model was designed to assist

in detailed field-level soil nutrient management. There are three recommended fertilization method available for different crops, including ASI nutrient classification method, Nutrient balance method and Dissimilar Subtraction Method of Soil Fertility (Fig. 6). Base on the field soil nutrient status, recommended fertilization system can make fertilizing scheme for nearly 20 kinds of crops, such as rice, wheat, sugarcane, etc. recommended fertilization results in selection of fertilizer variety and fertilizing method, recommended fertilizing scheme, application of organic fertilizer, etc.

Crop nutrient deficiency diagnosis All data about crop nutrient deficiency symptoms had been

collected and stored in text files, including Nitrogen deficiency, phosphorus deficiency, potassium deficiency, etc. The diagnosis should be based on symptoms above and below ground, and provide discrimination and solution method.

Fig 3 The integration scheme for farmland nutrient management

and recommended fertilization system

Integrated

Environment MapObjects

GraphicalData

attribute

Data

RDBMS ArcView

MapInfo

ARC/INFO

ODBC

Function

Module

Model

Fig 4 The interface for soil nutrient information inquiry

Fig 5 Spatial distribution of soil nitrogen content

Fig 6 The interface for recommended fertilization

V. CONCLUSIONS With consideration of the disperse farmland management

and fertilizer status in south China, the information technology and recommended fertilizer model had been integrated to develop soil nutrient management and decision system in Dushu village, Donghu town, Shaoxing, Zhejiang Province. In this contribution, we described a software architecture for the integration of recommended fertilizing models into GIS for specific analysis of field nutrient management in field scale. The integration of recommended fertilizing models into GIS enables the fully automatic spatial modeling of field nutrient management. The whole process of farmland nutrient management had been realized in the village information system with the specific field as basic management unit。All input data for recommended fertilizing models derive from the geodatabase.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT The authors would like to acknowledge financial support by

Leading Academic Discipline Project of Shanghai Municipal Education Commission (J50402) and Key Technologies R & D Program of NingBo,ZheJiang (2008C50016).

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