THE CURRENT STATE AND PROSPECT OF PLANT NUTRITION AND FERTILIZER SCIENCE

Over more than 100 years through hard work by the scientists, the plant nutrition and fertilizer science have formed their complete scientific systems, and played a great role in the agricultural production. Currently, The plant nutrition and fertilizer science are being rapidly developed for solving quantitative inputs of nutrients, investigating the mechanism of the nutrients while continuously studying their effects, and considering the interaction of different nutrients as a key point. In addition, the disciplines are being intersected with environmental and ecology sciences, and enlarged and extended their focuses on plant genetics, forming a new discipline, plant nutrition genetics. Strengthening the cycle and reuse of the nutrients, raising nutrient use efficiency, increasing plant abilities for utilizing nutrients, developing new types of fertilizers that may reserve nutrients and increase nutrient use efficiency will be the major areas for researches in the future. The market economy has promoted the development and appearance of new fertilizers on one hand, and made some different vague and blurred ideas on the other, which have influenced the normal development of the disciplines. These include underestimation of the role of the chemical fertilizers, overestimation of their pollution, and attribution of the poor quality of the agricultural products to the application of these fertilizers. Also, the concept of fertilizer has been distorted or misrepresented, leading to some confusion in the commodities of fertilizers. Clarification of the vague ideas and concepts will help the development of both plant nutrition and fertilizer science as well as agricultural production.