Abstract
Blending fertilizer with biochar followed by densification to make it into a tablet can enhance the adsorption of fertilizer on the biochar surface and reduce the nutrient loss during handling. However, the nutrient release and ammonia volatilization from biochar-blended fertilizer with and without densification are not well understood. The objectives of this study were to determine the nutrient release and ammonia volatilization from an acid soil applied with biochar-blended NPK fertilizer with and without densification. The nutrient release of biochar-blended NPK was determined using water incubation for 30 days, whereas daily loss of ammonia was measured using a closed dynamic air flow system for 10 days. The densified biochar-blended NPK caused stronger physical binding of the nutrients within the tablet in addition to stronger chemical bondings between the nutrients with the biochar’s functional groups. As a result, nutrient release in the water incubation from the biochar-blended NPK fertilizer tablet was slower. However, blending the biochar with the NPK fertilizer increased soil ammonia volatilization relative to the NPK fertilizer alone. This demonstrates that the biochar-blended fertilizer tablet has the potential to serve as a slow release fertilizer for crop cultivation.
Highlights
With an increase in global demand for food, the current farm productivity levels rely heavily on fertilizer use
Our results suggest that the slow release of N- NH4+ in biochar and NPK fertilizer tablet (BF-T) relates to the stronger binding of ammonium sulfate in the pores and functional groups in biochar followed by the densification
The slowest nutrient release in Biochar tablet (B-T) is associated with its relatively lower total nutrient contents and the nutrients were likely bound in aromatic structural forms
Summary
With an increase in global demand for food, the current farm productivity levels rely heavily on fertilizer use. The major constraints against using conventional fertilizers are their low crop nutrient use efficiency (NUE) and high nutrient losses through surface runoff and leaching into water bodies. As high as 45% of N loss of urea was recorded after 30 days incubation in soil, whereas only 13% of N was lost from a slow release urea fertilizer [2]. The authors found that approximately 69% of ammonia (NH3) loss from conventional urea fertilizer had been reported after fertilizing the soil over 10 weeks. Another mobile soil nutrient, potassium (K), can be extensively lost by leaching during intense rainfall events [4]. A strong fixation of P by the highly acidic or alkaline soil limits available phosphate for plant use [5]
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