Abstract

The naive view has often been expressed that the chemist has only to determine the plant food by analysis of the soil and then by subtraction from the total need of the plant one can say how much more is needed for a given crop and at this the problem of plant nutrition is solved. This is highly erroneous as only an almost trivial fraction of the total amount of any plant food in the soil is available to crops at any one time and there are innumerable complicating factors preventing the simple solution to the problem of estimating the amount actually available to the plant. Years of research has shown that the nutrition of the plant is a very complicated subject. From the time Jon Baptista Von Helmont (3) conducted his classical experiments with the feeding of the willow tree some 300 years ago to the modern times, much field has been covered in this fascinating study of plant nutrition.

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