NITROGEN USE AND MANAGEMENT IN ORCHARDS AND VEGETABLE FIELDS IN CHINA: CHALLENGES AND SOLUTIONS

Highlights

● Excessive application of N fertilizers in orchards and vegetable fields (OVFs) in China is particularly common.

● Long-term excessive application of N fertilizers has made OVFs hotspots for N surplus and loss in China.

● Nitrate accumulation in the soil profile is the main fate of N fertilizers in OVF systems.

● Reducing the N surplus is the most effective way to reduce N loss and increase NUE.

Abstract

China is the largest producer and consumer of fruits and vegetables in the world. Although the annual planting areas of orchards and vegetable fields (OVF) account for 20% of total croplands, they consume more than 30% of the mineral nitrogen fertilizers in China and have become hotspots of reactive N emissions. Excess N fertilization has not only reduced the N use efficiency (NUE) and quality of grown fruits and vegetables but has also led to soil acidification, biodiversity loss and climate change. Studies using ¹⁵N labeling analysis showed that the recovery rate of N fertilizer in OVFs was only 16.6%, and a high proportion of fertilizer N resided in soils (48.3%) or was lost to the environment (35.1%). Nitrate accumulation in the soil of OVFs is the main fate of N fertilizer in northern China, which threatens groundwater quality, while leaching and denitrification are the important N fates of N fertilizer in southern China. Therefore, taking different measures to reduce N loss and increase NUE based on the main pathways of N loss in the various regions is urgent, including rational N fertilization, substituting mineral N fertilizers with organic fertilizers, fertigation, and adding mineral N fertilizers with urease inhibitors and nitrification inhibitors.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

nitrogen fate / nitrogen fertilizer / orchards / vegetable fields

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Acknowledgements

This work was financially supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (2017YFD0200106), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41671295), and the 111 Project (B12007).

Compliance with ethics guidelines

Xueqiang Zhu, Peng Zhou, Peng Miao, Haoying Wang, Xinlu Bai, Zhujun Chen, and Jianbin Zhou declare that they have no conflicts of interest or financial conflicts to disclose. This article does not contain any study with human or animal subjects performed by any of the authors.

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The Author(s) 2022. Published by Higher Education Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)