Effect of composting on the extractability of plant nutrients in organic wastes is essential for their recycling in sustainable soil fertility management. Therefore, an experiment was carried out to determine the concentrations of total C, total N, extractable P, K, Na and B in five types of fresh and composted manures (namely buffalo, camel, cow, goat and poultry). Laboratory results showed th...

The pollution of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) in livestock farms is a problem which need to be paid more attention to, due to the severe resistance dissemination and the further human health risk. In this study, all the relevant exposure matrices (manure, soil and water) of sixteen animal farms in Southeastern China were sampled to determine twenty-two ARGs conferring resistance to five m...

Changes in physicochemical characteristics, chemical structures and maturity of swine, cattle and chicken manures and composts during 70-day composting without addition of bulking agents were investigated. Physicochemical characteristics were measured by routine analyses and chemical structures by solid-state 13C NMR and FT-IR. Three manures were of distinct properties. Their changes in physico...

Laboratory incubation was conducted for 120 days to study the fate of phosphorus in poultry (PM), cattle (CM) and goat manures (GM). Phosphorus mineralized from manure was dependent on total P, Al and Fe content. Manures improved P availability in the order: PM>CM>GM; however, the highest amount of P was fixed or immobilized between 10 and 70 days of incubating with CM and GM. Fixation and immo...

Concern over the enrichment of agricultural runoff with phosphorus (P) from land applied livestock manures has prompted the development of manure amendments that minimize P solubility. In this study, we amended poultry, dairy, and swine manures with two rare earth chlorides, lanthanum chloride (LaCl(3).7H(2)O) and ytterbium chloride (YbCl(3).6H(2)O), to evaluate their effects on P solubility in...

The incorporation of ecological practices into sugarcane production and management has the potential to arrest and ameliorate the negative effects of monocropping on soil degradation and yield decline. Historically, the production of green manures as cover or break crops has been shown to improve the physical, chemical, and biological properties of soil for many crops in production agriculture....

The potentials of poultry, farmyard and refuse dump manures for management of Phytophthora root rot on sweet peppers, Capsicum annuum was evaluated in pot experiments under controlled conditions. Five week-old seedlings of pepper varieties were transplanted into heat sterilized soil amended with poultry, farmyard and refuse dump manures at 2, 4 and 8 tons/ha. The pots were arranged in complete ...

We report here the development, validation, and use of three real-time PCR assays to quantify the abundance of the following three groups of tetracycline resistance genes: tet(A) and tet(C); tet(G); and tet genes encoding ribosomal protection proteins, including tet(M), tet(O), tetB(P), tet(Q), tet(S), tet(T), and tet(W). The assays were validated using known numbers of sample-derived tet gene ...