Sustainability of the rice–wheat rotation is important to Asia’s food security. Intensive cropping with no return of crop residues and other organic materials results in loss of soil organic matter and is not sustainable. We evaluated effect of eight treatments comprised of various combinations of green manure (GM), wheat straw (WS), rice straw (RS), farmyard manure (FYM) and urea alone (contro...

During spring storms massive uprooting of Littorella uniflora occurred in a shallow Dutch softwater lake. The aim of this study was to test whether changes in plant morphology and sediment characteristics could explain the observed phenomenon. Uprooting was expected to occur in plants having a high shoot biomass and low root to shoot ratio (R:S), growing on sediments with a high organic matter ...

In this study, poultry manure compost and organic fertilizer were added to soils derived from basalt, granite, and river alluvial deposits for use as soil parent materials. Following incubation periods of 30 or 60 days at 25 °C, the physical and chemical properties and adsorption characteristics of the soils were studied. The results indicated that the application of poultry manure compost or o...

Eggs contribute for about 4% to the daily dioxin intake of humans. Research among layer farms in the Netherlands and other EU countries has shown that organic eggs contain more dioxin than conventional ones and that a significant number of organic farms produce eggs with a dioxin content that exceeds the EU standard. The hens’ intake of dioxins from various sources leads to an increase in the d...

biological soil crusts (bscs) result from an intimate association between soil particles and cyanobacteria, algae, fungi, lichens and mosses in different proportions which live on the surface, or immediately in the uppermost millimeters of soil. therefore bscs cover the ground surface as a coherent layer, and influence primary processes such as carbon and nitrogen fixation and hydrologic status...

Microbial biomass nitrogen and carbon were studied in long-term field experiments with continuous cultivation of silage maize and with crop rotation. a positive effect of organic fertilizers on the microbial biomass nitrogen and the carbon content in soil was observed. Statistically significant effect of organic fertilizers on the higher content of microbial biomass C and n was established in t...

Composting is clearly reported as one of the most effective technique to transform organic wastes into an interesting resource, useful to improve soil characteristics and playing a potential role in reducing greenhouse gases, due to its high content in stable organic matter (Favoino and Hogg, 2008). However, its agronomical properties are dependent on several factors, which pollutant contents b...

Sustainable agriculture can increase the efficiency of resource utilization, provide longer productivity and create a balance in the environment. A field experiment was conducted to study the use of organic and chemical fertilizers on biomass, essential oil content and essential oil yield as well as chemical compositions of Dracocephalum polychaetum Burnm in the first and second cutting. The tr...

Factors affecting the occurrence and distribution of entomopathogenic fungi in 244 soil samples collected from natural and cultivated areas in Spain were studied using an integrated approach based on univariate and multivariate analyses. Entomopathogenic fungi were isolated from 175 of the 244 (71.7%) soil samples, with only two species found, Beauveria bassiana and Metarhizium anisopliae. Of t...