Influencing the germination of different crops by liquid biogas digestate

Anaerobic digestion (AD) of solid and liquid organic wastes is vastly increased world-wide. This process has a lot of positive effects on the environment, among others the use of AD’s by-product, the digestate, in the agriculture. Digestate could be a liquid or solid material with high nutrient and organic matter content which is appropriate to, at least partly, substitute for artificial fertilizers because of its favourable effect on the development and increase of plants. Digestate can be used before sowing and in this case, it has effect on the germination of crop sown. Therefore our aim was to study the effect of a liquid digestate on the germination and early development of different plants grown in our region. We examined the modification effect of soil type and application times on the effect of applied digestate and we studied the differences among the tested plant species.

Germination experiment was carried out in Petri dishes (Ø=8.5 cm) filled with 80 g sand and loamy meadow soil substances which were watered to the 60 % of their field water holding capacity. Tested concentrations of digestate were 25%, 50% and 100% (v/v) and tap water was used as control. Treatments were done on the day of sowing, 5 days and 21 days before sowing. Tested plants were soybean (Glycine soja L.), sweet corn (Zea mays convar saccharata), rye (Secale cereale L.), winter wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) and sunflower (Helianthus annuus L.). The number of seeds tested depended on the size of the seed, exactly 10 seeds of soybean, sweet corn, 15 seeds of sunflower and 50 seeds of rye and, winter wheat were used in the Petri dishes. The irrigation of seedlings was done in a case of need when seeds began to show wilting symptoms. The germination rate of tested plants was measured on the 10th day after sowing, according to the Hungarian Standard. For toxicity tests the germination index (GI%) and the relative growth index (GRI) were used to calculate the phytotoxic effects. We modified these indexes by using the dry mass of root and shoot of plants. The roots and shoots were measured on the 10th day after sowing. Treatments were carried out in four replications. The statistical analysis of the measured values was done by one-way ANOVA following with Tukey’s test for all tested plants, respectively with the SPSS 13.0 statistical program. The effect of digestate on the germination of seeds depends on the type of soil, plant species (perhaps variety, but it was not examined), doses of digestate, period of digestate application before sowing. Overall, the most sensitive plants were winter wheat and sunflower in both soil substances. For these plant species, only the smallest digestate dose (25%) not caused inhibition, or the germination of these species could be increased in a small rate. The number of germinated seeds and living plants were increased in the case of non-sensitive plant species. Application of digestate for improving the germination rate of crops plants is more effective on sandy soil substance. To take into account the properties of this soil type, the use of digestate as a plant nutrient is very important not only in the point of the environmental protection but also in the point of the sustainable crop production. Generally, early application of digestate causes the loss of nutrients and water and therefore its positive effects are decreased. On the other hand, the high doses of digestate applied near the sowing results the decrease of germination. On loamy meadow soil substance, the inhibitory effect of digestate application was experienced more often, the tested species seemed to be more sensitive than on sandy soil substance, where the treatments increased the germination in a higher rate, comparing to the controls.



Copyright: © European Compost Network ECN e.V.
Quelle: Orbit 2012 (Juni 2012)
Seiten: 8
Preis: € 8,00
Autor: Marianna Makádi
V. Orosz
Miklós Gulyás
J. Lengyel
 
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