Research Projects

Indian agricultural soils are low in organic carbon and nutrient-providing capability, but they are being explored to feed the growing population. Intensive agriculture, imbalanced nutrient management, and environmental stresses like drought and erosions worsen the situation. soil health is crucial for maintaining sustainable productivity, but direct measurement is impossible due to soil's physical, chemical, and biological indicators. The importance of biological variables for sustaining soil quality, health, and fertility has been known through holistic biochemical and biotechnological approaches. The Cornell Assessment of soil health was publicly available in 2006, using biological variables and their scores to predict soil health. Rapid and visual tests for farmers to assess soil quality are gaining importance, such as solvita® and Haney soil health test®. However, no attempts have been made in India to develop on-site farmers' friendly tools to monitor soil's biological properties to sustain soil quality. The present work focuses on three microbiological processes: soil respiration, dehydrogenase, and amino nitrogen. soil CO2 evolution is used to monitor the impacts of tillage, crop management, and crop sequence. soil dehydrogenase is a potential indicator of the microbiological redox system, and measuring soil dehydrogenase could be an accurate measure of soil health. The third biochemical process is amino nitrogen of soil, representing microbial-formed nitrogen. Developing simple color-change-based sensors to measure these biological indicators would help farmers identify soil health. A farmer-usable simple kit will be designed to pursue soil respiration, dehydrogenase, and amino-N to assess soil health, aiming to help continuous monitoring of soil health.