Introduction

Farming, for the most part being a mantle passed down from generation to generation, farmers feel obliged to stick to age old patterns of farming right from the seasons of working the ground to ritualistic harvest practices. Only recently in the past decade have farmers started adopting informed crop cycle patterns (Soleri and Cleveland (2004). In general, farmers have an opinion that more fertilizer equals more yields yet it cannot be farther from the truth. The role of chemical fertilizers is very important and acceptable, because it plays an important role in increasing soil fertility and increasing crop production (Jallah et al., 1991; Simonne et al., 2017). However, long term usage of inappropriate chemical fertilizers will decrease the quality of soil and increase the soil degradation and effects ecological pollution (Ayoub, 1999; Patnaik, 2010). Sometimes the fertility and quality of the soil is heavily affected due to the knowledge void of the farming community. The impact of the chemicals is the most severe among the various others. Savci (2012) and Ning et al. (2016) have mentioned the vulnerabilities of chemical fertilizers and the contamination of various types of environmental pollutions. Aziz et al. (2015) have reported in detail about the need of fertilizers and their impacts on environment. On this basis, we have come to know the effects of chemical agriculture and the adverse effects it has on our agricultural lands. So every attempt at remediating the damage done is being attempted by mindful and discerning farmers/agricultural engineers. But the efforts to shift from modern agricultural practices to primitive yet more effective methods of cultivation presents its own set of complications, as our lands have lost the bounce back ability to cope up with organic and natural cultivation methods to produce a similar quantum of agricultural produce upon termination of chemical inputs. Fertilizer usage and crop production are heavily interlinked processes, especially in horticultural crops (Fageria, 2001). Soil and Water quality, fertilizer quality and quantity, micro nutrients, and climatic factors, are all equally important, and if even one of them is not optimum, then the production is affected (Lal and Moldenhauer, 1987). Several models have been proposed by many researchers for the issue of fertilizer consumption considered through various points of view. Zhang et al. (2016) using the platform of Network of Science and Technology Backyards (STB), have examined fertilizer consumptions during the span of crop cultivation. As per their findings, the yield of wheat increased by 11% with addition of 1.5% Nitrogen alone. Nájera et al. (2015) evaluated soil fertility from soil samples of 31 maize cultivating farmers by testing micronutrient and macronutrients. They found that the Maize does fairly well in neutral- alkaline soils along with high inputs of NPK and Zn. Delzeit et al. (2017) presented a concept of trade-off between crop production and crop diversity, along with crop land expansion for improving food security, in the context of possible food shortage scenario in the decades to come (Natarajan et al., 2016) have analysed sugarcane yields in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu and have suggested optimum parameters for both soil nutrients as well as environmental factors for cultivating sugarcane. Toyonaga et al. (2005) addressed the problem of crops chosen seasonally in Japan. Apart from their formulated problem, they also introduced the concept of fuzzy based profit coefficients for a more efficient and effective farming model. Fan et al. (2011) concentrates on the use of minimum amount of fertilizer to get efficient outcome with respect to environmental pollution in China. Papadopoulos et al. (2011) analysed the nitrogen fertilization requirement for cotton through a fuzzy based decision support system, which analysed 30 years of rainfall data and 8 years of temperature data.