Impact of soil amendment using indigenous inoculants on tomato growth and yield parameters

Abstract

Tomato (Lycopersicon esculentum mill) is one of the most important vegetable crops in the world. It is widely acknowledged that using composts and microbial inoculants as soil amendments, rather than industrialized fertilizer and raw manure, could improve soil nutrients, promote soil health and consequently improve crop yields. Global population increase necessitates increasing crop yields. Improvement and maintenance of soil fertility is essential via bio-augmentation in this economic recovery era. In this work, an open field experiment was conducted in other to study the "Yield Effects of Indigenous Microbial Inoculants on Tomato using autochthonous microbial consortia”. The experiment was laid in Randomized complete Block Design (RCBD) with three replicate consisted of six inoculants samples; Indigenous cultures viz; (A) Control, (B)Bacillus mucilaginosus (C) Azospirillum sp., (D) Azotobacter sp. (E) Commercial strains of the inoculants (F) Consortium of B, C and D. The various morphological features/yields parameters measured at intervals includes; no. of leaves, plant height, root length, accumulated dry matter and average fruit weight. The result shows that indigenous inoculants (F) increased tomato overall yield. This research is also of great significance for the development of management strategies for soil maintenance, environmental protection, and resource conservation in Nigeria where soil fertility is on the decrease due to over-use of land in other to achieve food security. From the result of the research, it can be concluded that soil augmentation with indigenous inoculants improves tomato morphological features and yields, hence should be preferred above their exotic commercial strain counterparts because of cost of importation/indigenous product development and GDP growth.