BRADYRHIZOBIUM TECHNOLOGY - A PROMISING SUBSTITUTE FOR CHEMICAL NITROGEN-FERTILIZER IN BANGLADESH AGRICULTURE

Nitrogen is the most limiting element in Bangladesh soils and urea is the fertilizer commonly used for supplying it. Bradyrhizobium/Rhizobiu m inoculant was tried as a source of N nutrition for grain legumes in a number of field experiments. The inoculants markedly increased nodul e number, nodule mass, shoot weight and yield of the crops compared to uninoculated control and urea-N treatments. For soybean (Glycine max) , inoculation increased yield 113 percent over the control and 49 perc ent over the urea treament. For groundnut (Arachis hypogaea), the incr eases were 36 and 11 percent; for lentil (Lens culinaris), 30 and 13 p ercent; and for mungbean (Vigna radiata), 47 and 7 percent. The local inoculant strains were suitable for dependable inoculant production. T he inoculant technology can be used as a promising and cheap substitut e of urea for growing food legume crops in Bangladesh.