Discipline interactions in the quest to adapt plants to soil stresses through genetic improvement.

Tropical soils are inferior in fertility compared to temperate soils. The "Tropical Belt" of the world contains 58 percent of the world's land area suitable for agriculture production. The adaptation of plants for tropical agriculture is frequently synonymous with adapting plants to soil fertility stress constituents. This phenomenon is by no means limited to the tropics, as the acid soils and subsoils of the Southeast U.S. are examples where plant improvement programs are often associated with adapting plants to soil stress. Modern plant breeding has traditionally produced crop cultivars that are very productive when combined with an intensive input management regime. The merits and difficulties of establishing collaborative, multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary research and crop cultivar development programs to increase nutrient use efficiency and tolerance to toxic elements are reviewed and discussed. The goal for increasing nutrient use efficiency is not to increase the mining potential of soils by plants or develop a temporary fix for soil fertility problems, but rather to transform marginal agriculture land suitable for agriculture production into productive sustainable agriculture land by developing and utilizing cultivars with soil stress tolerance and improved nutrient use efficiency.

Bibliographic Details

Main Author:	SCHAFFERT, R. E.
Other Authors:	ROBERT EUGENE SCHAFFERT, CNPMS.
Format:	Parte de livro biblioteca
Language:	English eng
Published:	2011-04-10T11:11:11Z
Subjects:	Programa, Programme., Melhoramento, Pesquisa., breeding, research.,
Online Access:	http://www.alice.cnptia.embrapa.br/alice/handle/doc/477324
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