Plasma Agriculture: A green technology to attain the sustainable agriculture goal

Abstract

The agriculture sector has many issues such as reductions of agricultural lands, growing population, health issues arising due to the use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, reduction in soil health due to extreme use of synthetic chemicals during farming, etc. The quality and quantity of foods required for living things are affected by many factors like scarcity of nutrient-rich soils, lack of suitable fertilizers, harmful insects and bugs, climate change, etc. There is a requirement to supply the proper nutrients to plants/crops for obtaining a high crop yield. Synthetic chemical fertilizers provide nutrients (macro and micro) to plants for their growth and development but the excess use of them is not good for a healthy lifestyle as well as for the environment. Plants need significant amounts of macro-nutrients (nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium, urea, etc.) and some micro-nutrients (iron, sulfur, magnesium, zinc, etc.) for growth and development through various physiological and metabolic processes of the plant system. Along with the nutrients, there is also a demand to control the harmful microbes, insects, pests, etc. during the growth of plants for increasing the crop yield. In recent years, non-thermal plasma (NTP) is considered as an advanced green technology for enhancing productivity in agriculture sectors. The plasma-treated water (PAW) can help in enhancing seeds germination, increasing the rooting speed, stimulating plant growth, deactivating microbes/bugs, etc. The atmospheric pressure plasma (NTP) contains energetic electrons, UV radiation, and various reactive nitrogen and oxygen species. During the plasma-water interaction, these reactive species in the gaseous form get dissolved into water and it becomes rich in nitrogen compounds (N-content). These nitrogen compounds in plasma-treated water act as fertilizer for plants to keep them healthy but PAW does not have some essential plant nutrients like potassium, phosphorus, sulfur, iron, magnesium, etc. Therefore, it is required to add such nutrients in addition to nitrogen compounds in the plasma-treated water to use it as a nutrient-rich fertilizer. In this report, we provided the details of nutrients and their functions in the growth and development of plants/crops. How plasma technology can resolve many future challenges in the agriculture sector is discussed in detail. A few experiments on seed germination and plant growth (root and shoot length) were performed in the laboratory to explore the effect of plasma-activated water on the growth and development of plants. These primary results demonstrate the great potential of plasma technology in the agriculture sector.