Ion Selective Electrodes As Analytical Tools For Rapid Analysis of Soil Nutrients

Abstract

Sustainable agriculture depends on the support of land resources, one of which is the soil as the primary medium growth of various agricultural commodities. Identification and evaluation of agricultural soil is absolutely necessary in order to be optimally utilized and maintained at the right time and right location, for sustaining the agricultural productivity. Development of analytical methods for soil parameters is also an effort to initiate the concept of precision agriculture. This paper is describing an on going work as an effort for implementing a rapid analytical method for some major soil nutrients (nitrate, ammonium, potassium and sodium) that responsible for plant growing, by using potentiometric analysis based on utilization of ion selective electrodes (ISE). At the beginning it is targeted to obtain the most effective extractant solution for extracting nutrient from the soil prior measurement. It was found that ammonium acetate, potassium chloride and nitric acid were not suitable for extractant solutions when the corresponding nutrient ions measured by ISE method. Promising candidate of the extractant solutions for this purpose were distilled water and calcium chloride. Validation of the proposed ISE method against standard spectrophotometric method is still necessary will be carried in near future.