Fertilizing Crops for Functional Foods

The Symposium on Fertilizing Crops for Functional Foods was held on the 11th of November, 2002, at the annual meetings of the American Society of Agronomy in Indianapolis, IN.

Consumer interest in healthy food is growing strongly. The new concept of “functional food” – food with enhanced levels of health-promoting phytochemicals – gives fresh perspective to the mineral nutrition of plants. This symposium was held to review the impacts of plant mineral nutrition on the functional food components – nutraceuticals – in crop products. While past soil fertility research has considered impacts on traditional quality parameters such as protein, oil and vitamins, these nutraceuticals represent a new area of discovery.

These proceedings detail ongoing research on the impacts of fertilizers and soil fertility on nutraceuticals - the health-functional food components - in a wide range of food crops.

The proceedings are in Adobe PDF format. The attached file is 1.3 MB in size.