Advancing Sustainable Agriculture with Nanofertilizers: Efficiency, Stress Resilience and Trade-Offs

Changing climatic conditions, declining crop productivity, soil fertility degradation, and land resource shortages, along with a fast-growing global population, all challenge resilient agricultural production. In efforts to produce sufficient food, growers have been using chemical fertilizers beyond the optimal level, which in turn escalates environmental pollution and climate variability and ultimately affects crop production. Nanofertilizers stand out as a promising solution to withstand stress conditions, reduce nutrient loss, and enable sustainable agricultural production. This article comprehensively reviews several recent literatures on abiotic stress resilience, nutrient use efficiency, crop productivity, and trade-offs related to ecotoxicity, phytotoxicity, genotoxicity, and food safety, as well as regulatory and adoption barriers and future research directions to provide an inclusive insight for users. We assess various studies on the development, formulation, characteristics, controlled-release mechanisms, and nutrient uptake pathways of nanofertilizers. The effectiveness of nanofertilizers in withstanding heat, salt, and drought stresses, as well as reducing metallic toxicity is reviewed in this article. Based on our evaluation, depending on the formulation, dose, timing, and application methods, nanofertilizers increase yield or the efficiency of nutrients use by the plants, with up to 100% yield increase under stress conditions. However, excessive nutrient uptake in plant tissue can cause phytotoxicity, genotoxicity, and ecotoxicity hazards. This might spread across the food system and endanger the health of the consumers and other animals. To use and expand nanofertilizers safely, effective regulatory standards for use and eradication need to be established through multi-actor involvement and long-term, field-trial-based research evidence. To provide reliable scientific information, more research is needed on the dosage and application methods, plant species or cultivar response, and prolonged consequences that may happen in the soil ecosystem because of nanofertilizers.