Reducing the over-use of nitrogen (N) fertiliser and mitigating leaching in highly cultivated agricultural areas have become the top priorities for potato researchers and the industry in the USA. In response, field trials were conducted in 2022 and 2023 at the University of Wisconsin Hancock Agricultural Research Station to explore the effects of different N fertilisation treatments on the in-season N status and at-harvest yie...

Background and aims Soil microbes perform essential functions for agroecosystems, but it is unclear whether and when variation in the composition of the microbial community matters for agronomic outcomes since high functional redundancy may render compositional variation irrelevant for function. We hypothesized that the complexity of organic soil amendments would determine whether microbial community composition and richness m...

Understanding the fate of fertilizer nitrogen (N) in cropping systems is critical to improving agricultural sustainability and minimizing environmental losses. However, efforts to trace fertilizer N are often complicated by manure application in dairy cropping systems. We used a stable isotope tracing approach to investigate how different manure products influence the fate of synthetic fertilizer N in a Midwestern maize silage...

Visible-Near Infrared (vis-NIR) spectroscopy can provide a faster, cost-effective, and user-friendly solution to monitor leaf N status, potentially overcoming the limitations of current techniques. The objectives of the study were to develop and validate partial least square regression (PLSR) to estimate the total N contents of fresh and removed leaves of potatoes using the vis-NIR spectral range (350–2500 nm) generated from a...