Abstract
An extensive use of chemical fertilizers has posed a serious impact on food and environmental quality and sustainability. As the organic and biofertilizers can satisfactorily fulfill the crop’s nutritional requirement, the plants require less chemical fertilizer application; hence, the food is low in chemical residues and environment is less polluted. The agriculture crop residues, being a rich source of nutrients, can be used to feed the soil and crops after composting and is a practicable approach to sustainable waste management and organic agriculture instead of open-field burning of crop residues. This study demonstrates a feasible strategy to convert the wheat and rice plant residues into composted organic fertilizer and subsequent enrichment with plant-beneficial bacteria. The bioactive compost was then tested in a series of in vitro and in vivo experiments for validating its role in growing organic vegetables. The compost was enriched with a blend of micronutrients, such as zinc, magnesium, and iron, and a multi-trait bacterial consortium AAP (Azospirillum, Arthrobacter, and Pseudomonas spp.). The bacterial consortium AAP showed survival up to 180 days post-inoculation while maintaining their PGP traits. Field emission scanning electron microscopic analysis and fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) of bioactive compost further elaborated the morphology and confirmed the PGPR survival and distribution. Plant inoculation of this bioactive compost showed significant improvement in the growth and yield of chilies and tomato without any additional chemical fertilizer yielding a high value to cost ratio. An increase of ≈35% in chlorophyll contents, ≈25% in biomass, and ≈75% in yield was observed in chilies and tomatoes. The increase in N was 18.7 and 25%, while in P contents were 18.5 and 19% in chilies and tomatoes, respectively. The application of bioactive compost significantly stimulated the bacterial population as well as the phosphatase and dehydrogenase activities of soil. These results suggest that bioactive compost can serve as a source of bioorganic fertilizer to get maximum benefits regarding vegetable yield, soil quality, and fertilizer saving with the anticipated application for other food crops. It is a possible win-win situation for environmental sustainability and food security.
Highlights
An exponential increase in the global population demands sustainability, safety, and security of food with minimum burden on the economy, Earth, and the environment
About 26,064 high-quality sequences were retrieved from wheat compost, while 12,888 sequences were recovered from rice compost
Twenty phyla accounted for the sequences in the rice compost with eighteen phyla shared with wheat compost samples, while Pacearchaeota- and Spirochetes-related sequences were only detected in the rice compost
Summary
An exponential increase in the global population demands sustainability, safety, and security of food with minimum burden on the economy, Earth, and the environment. Organic farming is a natural way of crop production that involves the use of ecologically safe cropfertilization and pest-management strategies such as compost, green manure, biological fertilizers, or biopesticides. A huge amount of crop residues are wasted annually either by burning in the field (after harvest) or in the industry during the refining process (husk and bran) (Abbas et al, 2012). The degradation of straw is very slow, and crop impact is less positive because it is chemically stable yielding a high value to cost ratio and contains high lignocellulosic material with a high C: N ratio (Dobermann and Fairhurst, 2002; Chen, 2014). Composting is a microbial-driven process that accelerates the waste degradation and conversion of complex materials into usable, simpler organic and inorganic forms (Zhang et al, 2016; Bhattacharjya et al, 2021)
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