Role of Different forms of Potassium in Plant Metabolism

Potassium plays a vital in the plant metabolism and has a major plant nutrient but its role has been neglected in Indian agriculture. During plant growth potassium is need to plant in large quantities so it is classified as macronutrient. In last few decades main focus is only on nitrogen and phosphoric fertilizer application resulting in lowering the level of potassium in soil. Thoroughly investigation on the optimization of nitrogen and phosphoric fertilizer is important to know the interaction between the N, P, and K fertilizers. Now a day’s potassium deficiency is a major concern because it plays a major role to strengthen the plant defense system. Rather than the fertilizers potassium can be applied in soil by application of effluents like waste water of olive oil mill and they have direct effect of increasing exchangeable K in soil, but this increases smaller than that of produced by K fertilizers. Reason behind the decrease in the level of potassium in soil as well as sub soil is might be due to the leaching losses and higher uptake by the crop plant and lost from soil in the form of crop harvest. The current practice of application of potassium fertilizer is without taking into consideration of soil K status as well as plant demand is either limiting the crop yield resulting in K mining by the crop plants. Lower level of potassium in intensive agriculture leads to gradual decrease in the yield. Therefore if we want the steady state of yield and increased level of yield than we have to maintain the level of potassium in soil at optimum by fertilizer application after knowing the present level potassium in soil by soil analysis for available potassium.