Soybean herbage yield, nutritional value and profitability under integrated manures management.

Muhammad Aamir Iqbal,Abdul Hamid,Imtiaz Hussain,Celaleddin Barutçular,Bilal Ahmad,Ayman El Sabagh,Muhammad Imran,Rana Dildar Khan,Saira Ishaq

doi:10.1590/0001-3765202120181384

Abstract

Organic manures are more preferred and environmentally friendly than chemical fertilizers for minimally contaminating soil, water and environmental resources, but the determination of right source of organic manures continues to remain an unexplored aspect. Considering the important issue, a multi-year field trial was carried out to determine the response of forage soybean to four sources of nutrients such as chemical fertilizers (IF), poultry litter (PL), bovine's farm yard slurry (BFYS) and sewage sludge (SS) and their seven binary combinations (PL+BFYS, PL+SS, PL+IF, BFYS+SS, BFYS+IF, SS+IF and PL+BFYS+SS). Supplementation of organic manures with mineral fertilizers remained superior to their sole application, particularly BFYS + IF was found significantly (p≤0.05) superior for yielding the highest fresh biomass (23.9, 26.4 and 25.7 t ha-1) with improved nutritional quality. The same combination of integrated fertilizer management also recorded higher sustainability as per sustainable forage yield index along with the highest net income and the benefit-cost ratio. PL and SS applied in conjunction with IF performed better than sole or binary application of organic manures. Therefore, BFYS + IF may be recommended for adoption to produce comparable forage yield and nutritional quality of soybean along with reducing dependency on chemical fertilizers.

Highlights

Conventional crop production systems utilize inorganic fertilizers for plant nutrients which are criticized for contaminating water and environmental resources along with risk of disturbing marine and terrestrial ecosystems under changing climate (Strahinja et al 2016, Iqbal 2018)
After three years of observation, it was revealed that all fertilization regimes significantly influenced the yield attributes of soybean viz., plant height, stem girth, branches and leaves plant-1
Solo application of Inorganic fertilizers (IF) gave the tallest plant with the highest stem girth, branches as well as leaves plant-1, while sole application of Poultry litter (PL) produced the lowermost yield attributes

Summary

Introduction

Conventional crop production systems utilize inorganic fertilizers for plant nutrients which are criticized for contaminating water and environmental resources along with risk of disturbing marine and terrestrial ecosystems under changing climate (Strahinja et al 2016, Iqbal 2018). In addition to ecological concerns, nutritionists are alarming of food and feed contamination in traditional farming systems (Melati et al 2011, Ahmad et al 2014). Regular increase in the prices of chemical fertilizers hinder their optimal use in developing countries, which necessitate exploring alternate sources of plant nutrients (Uchino et al 2009, Iqbal et al 2019a). Bedding materials of poultry sheds and slurry of bovine farm yards could be the potential sources of nutrients depending upon their chemical composition (Bandyopadhyay et al 2010).

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion