Field Notes
Humic acid in tropical acid soils: the meta-ana...
A 2024 meta-analysis in Agronomy pooled many field trials and found that humic acid application raised crop yield by about 12% on average, improved...
Potassium deficiency in oil palm: the smallhold...
Potassium is the nutrient oil palm (Elaeis guineensis) removes in the largest quantity, and it is also the one most often left short in smallholder...
Palm oil mill effluent (POME) as a soil amendme...
Palm oil mills in Malaysia generate approximately 55 to 67 million tonnes of liquid effluent (POME) annually. Properly treated, POME is a rich organic biofertiliser containing nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, and...
Rubber tree interrow cover crops in Malaysia: m...
Rubber smallholders in Malaysia manage 1.1 million hectares of Hevea brasiliensis: much of it on low-fertility acid soils with no systematic interrow management. Leguminous cover crops offer rubber growers the...
Cover crop management during Malaysian dry spel...
El Nino-driven dry spells increasingly affect Malaysian oil palm regions. Well-managed cover crops provide a biological moisture conservation system that reduces soil evaporation, maintains root zone humidity, and supports palm...
Biological nitrogen fixation in Malaysian oil p...
Leguminous cover crops fix 50 to 180 kg of atmospheric nitrogen per hectare per year in Malaysian oil palm: nitrogen that costs nothing beyond seed and establishment. This article explains...