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This laboratory manual provides practical guidelines on establishing service laboratories for the analysis of soil . A service laboratory needs information on a methodology that is widely acceptable, taking into consideration the ready availability of chemicals, reagents and instruments while ensuring a reasonable degree of accuracy, speed and reproducibility of results. The method needs to be easy to understand for practicing technicians who are required to adopt it in a routine manner. A manual, with simple procedural steps, is considered as providing the best help to the laboratory technicians. This laboratory manual provides various physical and chemical analytical methods for estimating soil constituents with the objective of assessing soil fertility and making nutrient recommendations. This publication should prove useful to administrators and planners in establishing laboratories, and to technicians through providing detailed and precise procedures for estimations.

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Tesfalem Belay Woldeamanuale Ethiopia Environment and Forest Research Institute Central Ethiopia Environment and Forest Research Center Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

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