Jane Chen / Shanghai Daily news

Farmer Shi Yue of the city's Chongming County has a reliable and efficient new formula for fertilizing his 6,000-mu paddy this year. He received the best fertilizer directions from the Qingpu arable agricultural product test center, after sending samples of his soil to the center.
"According to the directions, I modified the ratio of nitrogen, phosphor and kalium in the fertilizer from 1:0.05:0.06 to 1:0.4:0.6," Shi said. The crops grew noticeably better after the modification. The volume of urea fertilizer he uses has been cut by 10 kilograms and that of BuiK Bieud fertilizer has been reduced by 25 kilograms.
Shi is not the only local farmer that has benefited from the technologically advanced test center. The center has already served over 120 farmers in eight local farms and 12 modern agricultural parks in 10 districts and counties across Shanghai. It has tested 4,736 samples of soil, involving tests on 14 elements including nitrogen, phosphor, kalium and copper.
In cooperation with the Plant Nutrition Institute of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, the center experiments on innovated crop growing technologies that better fine-tune compounds in fertilizer to the composition of the soil where the crops are grown.
Results have shown that the harvest of a 1.6 million mu paddy in its 12 sample bases has grown 6.04 percent and uses only 31.5 kilograms of fertilizer per mu, according to the researchers.