Calcium oxide nanofertilizer as alternative to common calcium products for the improvement of the amount of peel fruit calcium

Abstract

The necessity to improve the effectivity of fertilizers in agriculture, to be more in agreement with the new ecological trends, is a must nowadays. For this purpose, nanoparticles (NPs) could be an interesting alternative thanks to its enhanced characteristics due to the high surface-to-volume ratio. In this point, the use of NPs as nanofertilizers has been demonstrated that could be an alternative to conventional products using bulk macro and micronutrients. However, the effect of NPs on fruits has not been studied yet, although their effect on plants showed enhanced growth, root, shoot length, higher amount of biomass without phytotoxicity effects. In addition, the study of these nanomaterials directly on field has been avoided until now.Therefore, in this work the effect of CaO NPs as foliar feeding nanofertilizers was studied directly on field for different fruits (cherries, apples, peaches, pears, tomatoes, grape, Paraguayan and apricots). For this purpose, the NPs size, the effect of the presence of chelate agents in the product and comparison with bulk fertilizers was evaluated.The results showed that the use of CaO NPs increase the content of Ca2＋ in the peel fruit and the peel cell width. In addition, the products using CaO NPs showed similar results than those obtained when a bulk Ca2＋ commercially available product is used but using 20 times less CaO than the commercial product. Therefore, the proposed CaO NPs as foliar fertilizer alternative foliar to improve the peel Ca2＋ content and the cell width has been demonstrated.