Traditional Coffee Plantations in India are associated with some of the most fertile soils, rich in organic matter. Over the years, coffee cultivation spread out to non-traditional areas like lowland rice fields, plains and hills, which are low in organic matter. It’s a fact that soils rich in organic matter are also rich in sulphur. […]
Role of Microbes in Denitrification
More than 95 % of the coffee farmers in India have little understanding of the complex and volatile chemistry that occurs in straight and complex fertilizers. Once the chemical fertilizers are applied to the field they have to operate in an unpredictable harsh environment and send energy forward and backward a hundred times before a […]
Importance of the Nitrogen Cycle In Ecofriendly Shade Coffee
The nitrogen cycle is one of the most important and complex of the biogeochemical cycles. Nitrogen gas (N2) is an inert gas composed of two atoms of nitrogen linked by a very strong triple bond. Although 78 percent by volume of the atmosphere is nitrogen gas, this abundant reservoir exists in a form unusable by most plants or organisms, unless […]
Plant Growth Promoting Rhizobacteria
The Coffee ecosystem is a self-sustaining stable ecosystem because of the Agroforestry model. Multiple crops grow harmoniously with a heterogeneous tree population. Coffee soils are rich in organic matter because of the enormous amounts of leaf litter due to the constant shedding of leaves from trees, shrubs, and the coffee bush. This provides the base […]
Coffee Agroforestry And Zinc Solubilizing Bacteria
Zinc is a necessary micronutrient for the metabolic activities of coffee and associated multi-crops. More importantly, zinc is required by microbes to carry out many essential physiological activities. Zinc added as a micronutrient often gets fixed in the soil and is unavailable to the plant. Plants can uptake zinc as a divalent cation but only […]
Coffee And Zinc
Zinc is required in small but critical amounts, especially in plantation cops. Among the micronutrients, Zn is the most limiting nutrient associated with Plantation crops. However, the role of zinc is much debated in coffee Agroforestry, despite scientific evidence that clearly points out to the fact that zinc plays a vital role in plant metabolism […]