The Koyal Group Info Mag Articles: Science of the soil to help sons of the soil

How did this high level of P come about? Through the overuse of fertilizers and manure by the farmers. As the Calicut scientists report, soil in Kerala is already inherently acidic and the overuse of fertilizers and manure only adds to the problem. Not only does much of the P in the soil gets fixed and becomes unavailable for plant growth but even some of the soluble phosphorus is lost through the run-off water from these sites and affects the quality of water in the nearby lakes and water bodies.

The Kerala State Planning Board’s report is thus an important and admirable exercise that calls for action. The Calicut scientists make some relevant suggestions towards this, e. g., skip the applications of high P fertilizers, test the soil periodically and reduce (or avoid) manure that contains high amounts of P. We must express our appreciation to Drs K. M. Nair, P, Rajasekharan, G. Rajasree, P. Suresh Kumar and M. C.Narayanan Kutty of the National Bureau of Soil Survey and Land Use Planning (of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research), the Kerala State Planning Board, and Drs R. Dinesh, V. Srinivasan, S. Hamza and M. Anandaraj, at the Indian Institute of Spices Research at Calicut for this important and relevant research and analysis. The second report in page 345 of the same issue of Current Science, by the budding science writer Ipsita Herlekar, highlights the discovery by scientists at the Central Salt and Marine Chemicals Research Institute, Bhavnagar, Gujarat. These scientists analysed as many as 60 types of bacteria in the Arabian Sea along the coast of Gujarat and found three species from there, namely, K. Palustris M16, B. Pumilus M27, and B. Subtilis H1584, are able to “eat” polyethylene — the synthetic plastic used in everyday life as bags and films to cover materials, and that the B. Subtilis H158 strain was the best among the three. This calls for further work which might help us find an eco-friendly way to manage this totally out of hand (and totally man-made) menace of plastic waste and pollution.

Let us applaud Drs K. Harshvardhan and B.Jha, the CSMCRI scientists for this discovery and hope they will take this further into the level of practical application, Ipsita for elegantly highlighting this CSMCRI work, and the journal Current Science for publishing these reports which are of “high impact” at the practical and actionable level. Bread and butter science is just important as “blue sky” science.

The above article is a repost from TheHindu