| Abstract: | Soil nutrient status is one of the most important constituents of land productivity. The research presented in this article is aimed at describing the influence of nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium availability on crop yields across the major soil types of Hungary, under different climatic conditions. For this purpose, historical times series data from a 5-year period (1985–1989) regarding soil, land management, and crop yield of more than 80,000 fields, representing approximately 4 million ha of arable land, were statistically analyzed. The database was recently recovered from statistical archives stored in the format of digital records of the early 1980s and were used to study the productivity of major soil types for winter wheat cropping under balanced fertilizer input. Calculations were made to quantify the effects of soil nutrient levels. The evaluation was also performed for optimal and suboptimal climate conditions. Results show that the effect of nitrogen availability (as obtained from organic-matter content) had the largest influence on winter wheat yields. Up to a 26% difference in yields was observed, both on those soils with balanced material regimes and on those with leaching material regimes, under optimal climatic conditions. The effect of different levels of phosphorous was most significant under optimal climatic conditions on soils with balanced material regimes, reaching up to 17% difference between soils with very low and high phosphorous levels. The effect of different levels of potassium was the least significant in soils with balanced material regimes (maximum 8% difference among categories) and somewhat more pronounced in soils with leaching material regimes. Differences between the effects of nutrient levels due to climatic variation were also observed. According to our findings, stable production can be planned on croplands with average nutrient availability, regardless which of the two soil types they belong to. On the other hand, yield gap can be detected on fields with both low and high nutrient levels among optimal and suboptimal years, for all three nutrients [nitrogen–phosphorus–potassium (N–P–K)] of the analysis. Although our findings are based on historical data, most of the main relationships described are valid under current climatic and management conditions as well. |
