Overview
With increasing demands for food to meet the growing population throughout Asia, increasing quantities of nitrogen fertilizer are being used, particularly urea. However, urea broadcast on rice paddies by the method commonly used by farmers can lead to the loss from 30 to 90% of the applied nitrogen. This loss represents an enormous cost to farmers, and ways need to be found to increase the uptake of nitrogen by rice. The project reviewed in this report addressed this problem by linking Australian scientists at CSIRO Division of Plant Industry with scientists at the Institute of Soil Science in Nanjing. and other centres in the People's Republic of China. and at the Malaysian Agricultural Research and Development Institute at Serdang, Malaysia.
