Abstract
Animal wastes may be promoted as an alternative to mineral fertilizers that remain unaffordable to the overwhelming part of smallholder farmers in Sub-saharan Africa. However for an efficient use, mechanisms that underly their impact on crops should be well understood. This study was conducted in mesocosm to evaluate impacts of two ways of composted poultry litter (CPL) addition on growth and nutrient use efficiency by cucumber. It included three treatments with five-bucket replicates each: Control, CPL applied on soil surface (CS) or buried to 10 cm-depth (CB). Dry CPL was added at the rate of 0.5 kg bucket-1. At harvest, root distribution was examined in the 0-5, 5-10 and 10-20 cm depths. Dry biomasses of roots, shoot and fruits were also determined and allowed for calculation of diverse indexes of biomass allocation (root:shoot ratio, root weight ratio, stem weight ratio, leaf weight ratio) and nutrient use efficiency (factor productivity of the compost, partial factor productivity of nutrients, agronomic efficiency of compost, and apparent agronomic efficiency of nutrients). The results showed that application of CPL led to a significant improvement of all considered parameters except for the leaf weight ratio which was higher in the control (44.1±3.3) than in CS (28.1±1.9) and CB 31.2±3.5). Total lateral root length was significantly higher in CS than in CB (113.5±10.7 cm vs. 75.5±9.0 cm). The number of lateral roots per plant in the 0-5 cm soil layer was higher in CS than in CB (5.4 vs. 1 root plant-1); the reverse was observed in 5-10 cm (1.2 vs. 4.4 root plant-1). Both fresh fruit yield and total dry mass were positively correlated to root attributes. These were themselves negatively impacted by soil acidity. All nutrient use efficiency indexes were higher in CS than CB. The CPL improved the agronomic performance of cucumber particularly when applied at soil surface.
Highlights
In sub-Saharan Africa, market gardening is an income-generating activity for urban and peri-urban farmers
Data of the present study showed that low soil pH led to limited lateral root development
This study showed that composted poultry litter greatly improved cucumber production owing to the quantity of nutrient it provided and the stimulation of root proliferation and development
Summary
In sub-Saharan Africa, market gardening is an income-generating activity for urban and peri-urban farmers. Peri urban agriculture is more and more intensive as observed in other sub-Saharan African countries, because of increasing food needs (Kasongo et al, 2013). In such situation, soil nutrient removals should be offset by inputs to maintain the soil fertility. Conventional solutions in particular mineral fertilization were proposed. This way, effective in the short term remains unaffordable to the overhelming part of small farmers because of the relatively high cost (Haefele et al, 2013). The use of this kind of fertilizer leads to environmental concerns
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