Announcement FertiliCalc

[Francisco Villalobos]

FertiliCalc: a decision support system for fertilizer management

Francisco J. Villalobos^a,b (ag1v...@uco.es), Antonio Delgado^c (adel...@us.es), Álvaro López-Bernal^a (g42l...@uco.es), Miguel Quemada^d (miguel....@upm.es)

^a U. Cordoba ^b IAS-CSIC, ^c U. Sevilla, ^d U.P. Madrid

 

We have developed FertiliCalc, a Decision Support System for fertilization. It allows the calculation of the required seasonal N, P and K rates, the most cost-effective combination of commercial fertilizers and the Ca, Mg and S balances in the field resulting from the fertilizer program chosen. Novel aspects of the calculations include the development of stochastic flexible fertilizer programs for N and the calculation of acidification and N losses.  Regarding P and K, estimations may be based on soil analyses or a maintenance approach.

The tool is a Windows program, developed with Visual Basic 2015. It is a single file of 1.6 Mb which can be downloaded freely at the official web page of U. Cordoba, Spain (http://www.uco.es/fitotecnia/fertilicalc.html).

Versions in 27 languages have been developed so far, including English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Persian, Arabic, Basque, Catalan, Italian, Japanese, Chinese, Polish, Turkish, Uzbek, Finnish, Galego, Russian, Dutch, Indonesian, Bengali, Hindi, Greek, Albanian, Urdu, Korean and English-US units which is the only one not using the Metric System.

The program has been tested in computers having Windows 7, 8 and 10 and requires Adobe Acrobat Reader to display the Manual and Reading Material. To ensure its integrity the executable file is digitally signed by University of Cordoba. Tutorials for the main versions of FertiliCalc are available in Youtube (channel ID UCuKxm6RHrAeLZ8-xvPdr1OQ).

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