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Abstract
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Thanks to the many application opportunities, nanotechnology has been incorporated into our daily lives, from producing energy to cleaning the environment to medicine and pharmaceuticals. Moreover, in the past decade, in the agriculture sector, nanofertilizers, nanopesticides, nanoherbicides, nanosensors, and all kinds of tools have been developed to improve plant yield and food quality. Nevertheless, some disadvantages have been noticed, and a deeper understanding of this technology must be addressed, specifically about the risks and nanomaterials’ fate in the environment, plants, and food. In the past two decades (2000e23), over 47,700 works have been published by the leading editors and publishers (Elsevier, Springer, MDPI, Nature, and Wiley) around the globe on topics related to nanotechnology and agriculture. Those works show how the scientists are focused on generating knowledge about how plants, vegetables, crops, and food in general could be upgraded to give some solutions to alleviate plant diseases; plant stress (biotic and abiotic); higher harvest yield; better food quality ; and of course all this to minimize the world’s human hunger. However, there is a gap that should be filled about the NMs’ fate and risk by their application in living organisms such as plants. These NMs can be bioaccumulated in different environments (air, water, and soil). Furthermore, they produce different changes and not often in a good way, like in the soilmicroorganism partnership or by scaling up the food chain. It is needed a proper use and application protocol for all the NMs, where can be shown the NMs’ adequate concentration, size, crystallinity, and all the critical physical-chemical properties to avoid or minimize the negative effect in all related natural systems (air, water, soil, microorganisms, plants, animals, and human beings). This chapter presented the role of nanofertilizers, from how they have been generated and applied to their benefits and concerns, and how t
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