Adding Manure and Fertilisers – Agricultural Practices

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What is Soil Replenishment?

The continuous growing of crops leads to loss of nutrients in the soil. It is therefore important to add nutrients to the soil before a new crop is grown. This addition of nutrients to the soil is known as Soil replenishment.

Manure and Fertilisers are added to the soil in the form of nutrients to replenish the soil. Manure is natural, while fertilisers are artificially produced.

What is Manure?

Manure is an organic substance obtained from the decomposition of plant or animal wastes. The process of adding manure to the soil to replenish its nutrients is called Manuring.

Farmers dump wastes of vegetables, kitchen scraps, animal wastes and dried leaves in a pit which are decomposed by various microorganisms into organic manure.

What are the advantages of adding manure?

• Manure helps the soil to retain more moisture, which in turn improves the water holding capacity of the soil. And a moist soil ensures that plants have a continuous supply of
• The moistness of the soil also makes it porous, which helps the exchange of
• Adding manure results in the increase of friendly microbes that help to enhance the fertility of the
• Manure also helps improve the texture of the

What are Fertilisers?

Fertilisers are chemicals which are rich in a particular nutrient. They are inorganic salts and are not produced naturally but are manufactured in industries.

Fertilisers are of various types like urea, ammonium sulphate, potash and many more. Fertilisers, unlike manure, do not provide any humus to the soil.

In what other ways can soil be replenished with nutrients?

Besides adding manure and fertilisers, there are other ways in which the soil can be replenished with nutrients. These include:

• Keeping the land fallow – This means no cultivation is done between two crops. This allows the soil to regain its

• Growing legumes – Leguminous plants have bacteria called Rhizobium attached to their roots. They help in fixing atmospheric nitrogen by converting them into nitrates that the plants can

• Crop rotation – In this method, crops which use different nutrients are grown alternately. For example, corn consumes a lot of nitrogen and beans return nitrogen to the So the farmer may grow beans after growing corn to replenish the nutrients in the soil.

Summary