Assessing the ability of soil tests to estimate soil available silicon: A comparison of soil extraction methods for predicting the silicon requirements for sugarcane

The common practice in agriculture is to apply fertilizers to different crops to get the maximum profit. Since silicon has been regarded as an essential nutrient to plants such as sugarcane, there has been a growing need of quantifying its fertilizer requirements.The accurate estimation of fertilizers allows to invest wisely as well as to protect the environment against the harmful effects of unnecessary applied fertilizers. The work tempted to use different soil tests to evaluate the soil available silicon for sugarcane from varied soils. It also tempted the use of varied silicon carriers as fertilizers applied to different soil types at different application rates. The work suggests the best combination of soil test, soil carrier as well as treatment rate to achieve the optimum sugarcane yield.