European Journal of Sustainable Agroecosystems

The customary employing of fertilizers seems to be extremely inefficient. This means that a large part of nitrogen and phosphorus that is applied is lost during the process of volatilization, leaching, runoff, or soil fixing. Because of this, nitrogen use efficiency for cereals is less than 40% and phosphorus recovery is only 10–30%. The crop that suffers from this problem the most is finger millet (Eleusine coracana L. Gaertn.) due to very high nutrient needs of this cereal crop as well as its growing in areas with little nutrients being supplied. The solution proposed by modern science to overcome the above problem is the application of nano-fertilizers. This new approach should help achieve the higher nutrient-use efficiency owing to the particular reactivity of these products, controlled release, and their targeted foliar application. This article intends to investigate the effect of nano-fertilizers on nutrient use efficiency with respect to finger millet. In order to write this review, a comprehensive literature search was made with the help of different databases such as Scopus, Web of Science, PubMed, ScienceDirect, and Google Scholar from 2010 to 2026 with 37 selected articles. A large number of research confirms that the introduction of the defined fertilizers can enhance the efficiency of traditional fertilizers, for example, foliar urea by 25% without causing significant crop losses due to positive effects of fertilization on crop canopy architecture and nutrition as well as micro-nutrient content of cereal crops. It is evident that results pertaining to drought suggest that nano-fertilizers can be applied in rain-fed agriculture. At the same time, the information about the impact of nano-fertilizers contradicts itself because in some studies there are evidences that significant quantities of nano-urea negatively affect yields, which proves that this type of fertilizers can be helpful when acting as an addition to traditional fertilizers instead of acting as their complete substitutes. Furthermore, it is necessary to state that there is a significant gap due to the absence of long-term studies on the use of finger millet as well as the absence of standard assessments of nano-fertilizers.