Liebig's Law of the Minimum, often simply called Liebig's Law or the Law of the Minimum, is a principle developed in agricultural science by Justus von Liebig. It states that growth is controlled not by the total of resources available, but by the scarcest resource. This concept was originally applied to plant or crop growth, where it was found that increasing the amount of plentiful nutrients did not increase plant growth. Only by increasing the amount of the limiting nutrient (the one most scarce in relation to "need") was the growth of a plant or crop improved. Agricultural science is a broad multidisciplinary field that encompasses the parts of exact, natural, economic, and social sciences that are used in the practice and understanding of agriculture. ... Justus von Liebig. ... Growth can mean increase in spatial number or complexity for concrete entities in time or increase in some other dimension for abstract or hard-to-measure entities. ... Natural resources are naturally occuring substances that are considered valuable in their relatively unmodified (natural) form. ... In biology, agricultural science, physiology, and ecology, a limiting factor is one that controls a process, such as organism growth or species population size or distribution. ... Divisions Green algae Chlorophyta Charophyta Land plants (embryophytes) Non-vascular plants (bryophytes) Marchantiophyta - liverworts Anthocerotophyta - hornworts Bryophyta - mosses Vascular plants (tracheophytes) †Rhyniophyta - rhyniophytes †Zosterophyllophyta - zosterophylls Lycopodiophyta - clubmosses †Trimerophytophyta - trimerophytes Equisetophyta - horsetails Pteridophyta - true ferns Psilotophyta - whisk ferns Ophioglossophyta - adderstongues Seed plants (spermatophytes) †Pteridospermatophyta - seed ferns Pinophyta - conifers Cycadophyta - cycads Ginkgophyta... Agriculture (a term which encompasses farming) is the process of producing food, feed, fiber and other goods by the systematic raising of plants and animals. ... A nutrient is either element or compound necessary for or contributing to an organisms metabolism, growth, or other functioning. ...

Liebig used the image of a barrel—now called Liebig's barrel—to explain his law. Just as the capacity of a barrel with staves of unequal length is limited by the shortest stave, so a plant's growth is limited by the nutrient in shortest supply.

Liebig's Law has been extended to biological populations. For example, the growth of a biological population may not be limited by the total amount of resources available throughout the year, but by the minimum amount of resources available to that population at the time of year of greatest scarcity. That is, the growth of a population of animals might depend not on how much food is available in summer, but on how much food is available in winter. A year is the time between two recurrences of an event related to the orbit of the Earth around the Sun. ... Phyla Placozoa (trichoplax) Orthonectida (orthonectids) Rhombozoa (dicyemids) Subregnum Parazoa Porifera (sponges) Subregnum Eumetazoa Radiata (unranked) (radial symmetry) Ctenophora (comb jellies) Cnidaria (coral, jellyfish, anemones) Bilateria (unranked) (bilateral symmetry) Acoelomorpha (basal) Myxozoa (slime animals) Superphylum Deuterostomia (blastopore becomes anus) Chordata (vertebrates, etc. ... For other senses of this word, see Summer (disambiguation). ... For other senses of this word, see winter (disambiguation). ...

This is closely related to the chemical principle of the rate determining step, and also to the project management principles of critical path and critical chain. The rate-determining step is a chemistry term for the slowest step in a chemical reaction. ... In project management, a critical path is the sequence of project network terminal elements with the longest overall duration, determining the shortest time to complete the project. ... Critical Chain Project Management (CCPM) is based on methods and algorithms developed in 1997 by Eliyahu M. Goldratt. ...