Abstract
Surveys to investigate how farmers use fertilizer in England and Wales began in 1942, prompted by the need for information which could be used immediately to determine a rational fertilizer import policy and also for allocation of scarce fertilizer resources during wartime. These surveys continued after the war in order to monitor trends in fertilizer use so that industry could predict future needs and advisory effort could be directed to situations where practice differed from recommendations based on experimental results. Environmental aspects of fertilizer use are now of greater public concern and this has increased the need for the information collected in the now annual national surveys of fertilizer practice. No other country in the world has monitored fertilizer practice in such depth over such a long period.
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