IMPROVING SOIL PROPERTIES BY USING BIOCHAR UNDER DRAINAGE CONDITIONS IN NORTH SINAI

Abstract

Increasing the water-holding capacity of sandy soils will help improve efficiency of water use in agricultural production and may be critical for providing enough energy and food for an increasing global population. We hypothesized that addition of Biochar will increase the water-holding capacity of a sandy soil and decrease drainage of sandy soil. Biochar used from local plant residuals; olive wastes including olive pomace (OP) and olive trees wood chops (WC) slow pyrolysis had undertaken on 4oooc for (OP) and 350oc for (WC). Biochar was mixed with soil (0%, 0.2%,0.4% and 0.8% w/w) and placed into columns. Biochar amended columns had a significant average increase of 44.4% and 70.4% in gravity drained water content, relative to the controls for WC350 and OP400.Columns receiving the 0.8 % Biochar treatment lost significantly less water to drainage to the other treatments. There were significantly differences in evaporation and drainage between 0.2 and 0.4% addition of WC350 and OP400, respectively. On the other hand, values of drainage observed in the 0.4 and 0.8 % of both Biochars were significantly less than the values of drainage for the 0.2% addition rates. Bulk density of the control columns increased significantly during the incubation from 1.42 to 1.47 g cm-3 for incubation day 0 and 36, respectively. On incubation day 36, we observed significant lower bulk densities of 8.82, 10.6, 3.11, 85.1, 5.45, and 8.56% for OP400-0.2%, OP400-0.4%, OP400-0.8%, WC350-0.2%, WC350-0.4%, and WC350-0.8% treatments, respectively, relative to controls. The results suggest that Biochar added to sandy soil increases water-holding capacity, decrease drainage of sandy soil and might increase water available for crop use.