The International Fertilizer Association ( IFA ), in collaboration with leaders in the field of agricultural research, launched a collaborative nutrition platform that will enable the sharing of nutritional data of agricultural crops with the aim of driving international research collaboration and making nutrition data accessible to farmers and country leaders all over the world.
The platform is built from two main databases used by agricultural researchers who conduct field experiments on soil fertility and crop nutrition, by allowing the various users to contribute and benefit from the datasets.
The first database provides researchers with the information needed to improve, streamline and increase productivity in crop nutrition programs, by examining the production and environmental factors that affect the concentration of nutrients in the crop, thus being able to determine the total amount of nutrients from the total harvested crop. The database initially focused on crops of high nutritional importance such as: corn, wheat, rice and soy.
The second database enables the comparison of requirements and crop nutrition plans of researchers from all over the world in order to find the most optimal way of managing nutrients. It is basically a database of nutrient omission experiments that focuses on crop nutrient requirements.
The importance of this special project is enormous. In today’s environmental conditions, which are changing so drastically due to the instability created by the growing climate crisis , there is a need to produce a sustainable agricultural crop . Global information sharing will make it possible, in an easier and more accessible way, to determine how to optimize long-term crop production in a more correct and stable manner adapted to those changing environmental conditions.
