Quality of plant products grown with manure fertilization

In the present situation of a market oversupply with many food products in Europe, the question of how to improve quality may be of increasing importance. This is basically true for all types of agriculture. In particular, this is relevant to organic farming, to its conception of itself and to its marketing strategy.
There is no doubt that among all agricultural practises fertilization and plant protection play a central role for crop quality. After having evaluated fertilization effects on plant yield, soil life and symbiotic nitrogen fixation during three previous meetings, the task of our present meeting was to evaluate the quality of plant products as influenced by manure fertilization. We realized that this is impossible without assessing quality parameters and analytical methods. Hence, we not only discussed fertilization effects but also examined parameters and methods used in our long-term experiments.