Abstract
Nitrogen release from organic amendments, e.g., from organic agriculture, is a key process to raise soil fertility to sustain crop production in low environmental impact agroecosystems. This study aimed to investigate nitrogen release from a pelletized organic amendment containing poultry litter, guano and pot ale applied to soil from a field under two different management systems: an alfalfa-based crop rotation, enriched with N by the legume, under low-intensity tillage and a cereal-sunflower crop rotation under high-intensity tillage. Both sample [...]
Highlights
Organic waste should no longer be considered a waste product, but rather a resource that farmers can use to improve the fertility of arable soils
This paper investigated the efficiency of a pelletized organic amendment containing poultry litter, guano and pot ale by analyzing soil from a field under two different management systems: (i) an alfalfa-based crop rotation enriched with N by the legume and under low-intensity tillage (L); and (ii) a cereal-sunflower rotation under high-intensity tillage (H)
In a 90-day laboratory experiment, the pellet efficiency in soil samples from the two treatments was tested for N-NO3 release and variation in microbial biomass carbon (MB-C), soil basal respiration (SBR), β-glucosidase (β-GLU), ortho-diphenol oxidase (o-DPO) and alkaline phosphatase (AmP), under different temperature and soil moisture conditions
Summary
Organic waste should no longer be considered a waste product, but rather a resource that farmers can use to improve the fertility of arable soils. Several organic amendments for arable soils are currently available, which are by-products from farms, agro-food companies or municipalities. They can be applied raw or somehow processed, e.g., by anaerobic digestion, composting or drying/pelletizing. Fertilizers are a source of relatively readily available nutrients and have a direct, short-term effect on plant growth. Soil conditioners on the other hand affect plant growth indirectly by improving nutrient bioavailability and/or soil physical and biological properties. Animal manures are organic amendments with value as soil fertilizers as well as conditioners. Composting changes the manure quality; nutrient availability will be lower after composting (Paul and Clark, 1996), but the composted manure is biologically much more stable and odor-, weed- and pathogen-free (Sims and Wolf, 1994; Lopez-Mosquera et al, 2008)
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