Controlled release fertilizers (CRFs) are a branch of materials that are designed to improve the soil release kinetics of chemical fertilizers to address problems stemming losses from runoff or other factors. Current CRFs are used but only in a limited market due to relatively high costs and doubts about their abilities to result in higher yields and increased profitability for agricultural businesses. New technologies are emerging that promise to improve the efficacy of CRFs to add additional functionality and reduce cost to make CRFs a more viable alternative to traditional chemical fertilizer treatment. CRFs that offer ways of reducing air and water pollution from fertilizer treatments, improving the ability of plants to access required nutrients, improving water retention to increase drought resistance, and reducing the amount of fertilizer needed to provide maximum crop yields are under development. A wide variety of different strategies are being considered to tackle this problem, and each approach offers different advantages and drawbacks. Agricultural industries will soon be forced to move toward more efficient and sustainable practices to respond to increasing fertilizer cost and desire for sustainable growing practices. CRFs have the potential to solve many problems in agriculture and help enable this shift while maintaining profitability.

AimsThe recent increases in food prices caused by the corresponding increases in fertilizer costs have highlighted the demand for reducing the overuse of fertilizers in industrial agriculture. There has been increasing interest in developing plant root-targeted delivery (RTD) of fertilizers in order to address the problem of inefficient fertilizer use. The aim of this study is to develop a low cost controlled release device to deliver fertilizers to plant roots and thereby increase fertilizer use efficiency.MethodsThe Root Targeted Delivery Vehicle (RTDV) is formed by dissolving Carboxymethyl Cellulose (CMC) chains in water, mixing it with liquid fertilizer and crosslinking using iron and calcium salts. Basic measurements quantifying nutrient release and green house growth trials were carried out to evaluate fertilizer use efficiency on wheat growing in nutrient depleted soil media.ResultsGrowing wheat in nutrient depleted media showed that the RTDV permits a 78% reduction in the amount of fertilizer needed to achieve similar levels of plant yield in these conditions. Quantifying the losses associated with the RTDV synthesis showed that optimizing manufacturing could possibly increase this value as high as 94%. Furthermore, the delivery device showed a similar lifetime in soil to the plant’s growth cycle, delivering fertilizer over the course of the plant’s growth before removal from soil by degradation.ConclusionsThese results illustrate the importance of fertilizer delivery in facilitating absorption and may have potential to vastly increase the use efficiency of fertilizers in soil, resulting in a significant reduction of costs and environmental damage. With more in depth study to quantify the fertilizer release and refine the device, there is great potential for the use of the RTDV as an effective means to increase fertilizer use efficiency in agriculture.

Technology is quickly catching up to even the most cutting-edge human factors research. Studies in interaction methods and behavior, which were planned to be purely academic, are suddenly directly applicable to commercialized products. Wearables, mobile devices, voice recognition, augmented reality, intelligent systems and remote education are all here, they work well and the pace is not slowing anytime soon. Society is also changing. There are more of us, we're moving to cities, we're getting older, we have more buying power, and, all over the world, adoption of these new technologies continues to grow. This has happened hand-in-hand with changes in industry. Its global reach, massive scale and detailed performance and usage data are leading to the creation of new products and services at an astonishing rate. All of these trends are setting the stage for a golden age of human factors research and applications, one that will be bigger and better than its roots in aeronautics. To promote and ensure this rich future, researchers and practitioners will need to be more connected to one another. It's easy for academic researchers to fall behind the rapidly advancing industry that practitioners live in every day. It is also easy for practitioners to be completely unaware of foundational research that can guide new products to success.