Role of Nanomaterials in Sustainable Agriculture

Sustainable agriculture is vital for the stimulation of developing as well as developed countries. With the use of conventional farming, several abiotic and biotic stresses in the agricultural field have led to many challenges like food security, environmental pollution and low productivity of crops. In the current scenario, agriculture needs innovation and modernization in order to fulfil the increasing food demands of the rapidly growing global population and to keep the environmental sustainability concurrently. Nanotechnology is coming up as a novel hope for the sustainable agriculture and it has gaining enormous attention in providing effective solutions to these agricultural issues for improving the productivity as well as food security. It has tremendous potential to revolutionize the resilient agricultural system. Nanomaterials (NMs) because of their compact size, excellent efficiency, easy transportation and handling, as well as longer shelf-life, are becoming the preferred choice of today’s farmers than the other conventional products. Hence, NMs are now becoming a new-age material to transform the modern agricultural practices. The goal of introducing NMs in agriculture is to minimize the amount of chemicals that enter the agroecosystem, lessen the nutrient losses and improve the crop yield. A variety of NM-based formulations such as nanopesticides, nanoherbicides, nanofertilizers, and nanosensors, have been extensively explored for plant health management as well as soil improvement. Nano-encapsulation helps to release the agrochemicals in a controlled way to reach a target-specific location. NMs also have a great opportunity in the field of transgenics through pathogen resistance. This review summarizes the current challenges of agricultural sustainability by exploring the area of nanotechnology and addresses new findings in the nanotechnology research field, development of NMs and its possible impact on crop protection and crop production for the improvement in agriculture.