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TECHNOLOGY
The Ministry of Agriculture, through the Spanish Agrarian Guarantee Fund, has signed an agreement with the Agrarian Technological Institute of Castilla y León (ITACyL) with the aim of improving soil information throughout Spain and making programming interfaces available. of applications for fertilization recommendations and fertilizer choice .
One of the legs of this agreement is that the FertiliCalc software will be the standard for calculating fertilization throughout Spain. This tool has been developed by the researcher at the Institute of Sustainable Agriculture (IAS) of the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC) of Córdoba and the Department of Agronomy of the University of Córdoba (UCO) Francisco J. Villalobos .
Francisco Villalobos has pointed out in a statement from the academic institution that "society demands from public administrations policies that allow reducing the environmental impact of fertilizers and other nutrients and at the same time we must maintain the level of agricultural production and hence the need to calculate the needs and types of nutrients and fertilizers for each crop.
FertiliCalc is an example of innovation that emerged in the university environment that now reaches the sector. It was created for teaching and includes the methodologies proposed by Antonio Delgado (University of Seville), Miguel Quemada (Polytechnic University of Madrid) and Villalobos himself. The software was later refined and translated into numerous languages.
FertiliCalc algorithms were adopted as the basis of nutrient calculation systems in the EU-funded FaST project. This project resulted in the Sativum system, developed by the Agrarian Technological Institute of Castilla y León (ITACyL), which includes FertiliCalc as a calculation base.
A version for Windows, translated into 91 languages and completely free, is currently available on the UCO website ( https://www.uco.es/fitotecnia/fertilicalc.html ), as well as mobile versions for iOS and Android, also free and translated into 38 languages, which can be downloaded from the app's official website ( https://www.fertilicalc.com ).
