Vegetal Nutricion:

In 1699 the naturalist John Woodward cultivated peppermint in water with different levels of purity and took advantage of the fact that where it grew best was in the residual water with mold from a park.

Woodward came to the conclusion that plants are not formed from water (as Aristotle believed), but from particles in the soil.

In 1804, the chemist and plant physiologist Nicolas Saussure, while studying the nature of Woodward's particles, observed that the growth of the plant mass could not be attributed only to the absorption of water, but also to that of carbon dioxide (which was not comes from the ground, but from the air)

It is now known that plants use as nutrients inorganic elements that are formed from the weathering of rock minerals and the decomposition of plant, animal and microbial organic matter.

Liebig's Law Of The Minimum:

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The German chemist Justus von Liebig compared the growth of plants after adding different minerals to the soil.

In 1840 he formulated the law of the minimum, which stated that increasing the amount of the most abundant nutrient did not increase plant growth.

Only by increasing the amount of the scarcest nutrient could the growth of a plant or crop be improved.

En torno a 1860 el botánico alemán Julius von Sachs determinó que seis elementos minerales (nitrógeno, fósforo, potasio, calcio, magnesio y azufre.) Son macronutrientes que la planta necesita en cantidades relativamente grandes porque los utiliza para construir su estructura.

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