Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
11.7 COMBATING CLIMATE CHANGE INDUCED SOIL
FERTILITY CHANGES
Areas covered with citrus as perennial crop are not easy to be replaced
with some other crops under climate change situation. A thorough under-
standing on climate change is needed to develop some mitigation technol-
ogies in the wake of crop responses via C
3
(Plants that fix carbon dioxide
through C
3
enzyme route as ribulose 1,5-diphosphate carboxylase have
greater potential for response to increased atmospheric levels of carbon
dioxide) or C
4
(plants that fix carbon dioxide through C
4
enzyme route as
phosphoenolpyruvate carboxylase), thereby, earning some carbon credits
and enhancing the income through trading of carbon (Farquhar et al., 1980;
Furbank and Hatch, 1987). In this regard, some production practices are
needed to undergo some adjustments to compensate climate change based
on practices facilitating improvised carbon sequestration as an effective
mitigation option since citrus trees act as strong carbon sinks (Paustian et
al., 1998).
Carbon sequestration (recognized by the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Changes and the European Commission as one of the possible
measures through which greenhouse gas emissions can be mitigated) is
the process through which agricultural practices remove carbon from the
atmosphere. Sequestration slows the rate of climate change by enhancing
carbon storage in trees architectural framework and soils (Johnson and
Kerns, 1991; Paustian et al., 1998).
11.7.1 ADJUSTING FERTILIZER SCHEDULING
It is our experience that the fertilizer schedule, which we developed in
1990s, is no longer so responsive, and when the same fertilizer schedule
was evaluated against other options during 2006-2013, some interesting
results were obtained without altering the total amount of fertilizer (Sriv-
astava, 2013).
The fruit yield significantly influenced by different treat-
ments having varying schedules of fertilization
(
Table 11.4
).
The high-
est fruit yield of 61.10 kg tree
-1
(16.92 tons ha
-1
) obtained with T
2
was
significantly higher to treatment T
1
(48.12 kg tree
-1
or 13.32 tons ha
-1
),
T
3
(52.32 kg tree
-1
or 14.49 tons ha
-1
) and T
4
(58.30 kg tree
-1
or 16.14 tons
ha
-1
). Thus, without changing the dose of fertilizer, just scheduling across
