Exploiting Plasma as a Recent Technology for Enhancing Productivity and Quality of Some Cultivated Crops in Salt–Affected Soils in Egypt.

Summary

There is no doubt that Egypt suffers from a great shortage of agricultural production, whether for human food or the availability of feed for animals and poultry. This necessitated the import of our requirements from abroad. The wheat gap, for example, has reached more than 50%, and this gap has not narrowed in almost 15 years due to the steady population increase despite the great efforts of the researchers in the continuous improvement of crop productivity. The situation is not very different for dry (yellow maize) or green (forage cowpea) fodder crops, where. concentrated feedstuffs for animals and poultry are imported. As a result, the importation of spending a lot of hard currency, which ends in raising the prices of food products such as flour and its products and the prices of red and white meat (animals and poultry), and consequently increase the burden on the Egyptian consumer. Thus, attempting to limit or reduce these gaps in such crops through unconventional techniques may have a positive impact in this regard, especially through the exploitation of some marginal Egyptian lands (affected by salinity) without competing with crops that occupy the lands of the valley and the Delta. Hence, plasma applications were considered as a cheap and safe tool in improving the productivity of strategic crops in Egypt (wheat, maize, fodder beans) and increasing their nutritional value by treating their seeds with plasma and planting them in salt-affected lands. There were promising preliminary observations of the beneficial effect of plasma in stimulating the growth of growing cowpea at the Faculty of Agriculture - Ain Shams University by Dr. Mohamed Fawzy, Dr. Hani Saudy, and Dr.. Abdel Fattah El Gendy (members of the research team for this proposal), which was the nucleus of the current proposal. Through the application of plasma technology, it is expected to increase the productivity of selected crops under salt-affected soils in terms of quantity and quality, which will have an economic impact on the individual (farmer) and thus improve his social conditions, which in turn affects the society as a whole. The quality of these crops is also expected to improve, helping to feed them in human nutrition and provide good feed for farm animals and poultry. The success of this technique in raising the productivity of crops under salt-affected soil conditions helps to sustain the cultivation of such lands and thus improve their properties.

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