Ferroin-A Suitable & Sensitive Reagent for Estimation of Boron in soil

In serving the interest of crops production, soil analysis is for the two major purposes: to establish the suitability and productive potential of land dedicated to a certain type of plant culture; and to diagnosis inherent or acquired deficiencies or deleterious conditions of the vegetative cover. In most cases, evaluation of a soil productive capacity is accomplished satisfactorily by determination of physical and nutrient contents of soils. In the past three decades, methods for determining nutrients have been changed from time-consuming gravimetric and volumetric procedures, to faster and more sensitive instrumental techniques. However, sensitive, selective and rapid methods are lacking. In the present investigation, for the determination of boron from soil extract, spectrophotometric method has been used, based on the extraction of the boron with ferroin into chloroform as a ferroin borodisalicylate complex, then boron is estimated by direct photometric measurements of the coloured extract We could not find any relationship between the available boron with the physical parameters except the soils from Pune district have a definite relationship between available boron and pH.