Fertility of privately owned plowland used for field crop production in the city of Kragujevac, Serbia

Abstract

The paper presents the results of soil fertility analysis on the production plots of the city of Kragujevac, Serbia. The analysis was conducted on a total of 467 plowland samples. The acid soil reaction, which belongs to the first three classes in the applied classification, was found in 86.56% of samples. On average, neutral soil reaction, which is the most favourable type of reaction for crop production, was found in 15.63% of all samples in this study. Regarding soil humus content, the results show that 59.54% samples are well supplied with humus, while 35.77% of the samples belong in the class of mostly slightly humic. Considering the readily available phosphorus content, the analysis showed that only 6.34% of the soils in the province have an optimum supply of this element. What is of concern is that a considerable proportion of our samples were determined to be either very poor (57.12%) or poor (19.28%) in phosphorus, while about 10% had harmful or toxic levels of this macronutrient. In the case of the levels of readily available potassium, the largest number of the samples had either an optimum or high supply of the element. The sum of such samples ranged from 54.54% to 97.73% depending on the area.

Keywords

• chemical properties
• humus
• phosphorus
• plowland
• potassium
• soil fertility
• soil pH