For experiments such as influence of biofertilizers on the growth and yield of vegetables, we need to have neutral soil i.e. soil without nutrients, to get accurate results. It is not possible to remove the soil every time from the experimental plots or vice versa, so a method is needed to remove the nutrients from the soil. Can anyone recommend a protocol?
Hi Naseer, ... I'm sorry but the picture is still not clear to me.
If you need to re-use a field soils there are fundamental problems you could expect .. & more importantly
WHAT QUESTIONS DO YOU NEED TO ASK YOURSELF OR YOUR SUPERVISOR???
1) following on from the comments above by Desiraju Rao ..... how realistic or easy to adopt are the recommendations of your research to the cultures, farmers or land users that may require answers to their problems?
2) are the field soils really in such short supply?
3) what influences, minerals or organic matter do you expect to remove? .... nutrients are much harder to remove compared to put in soils, ... nutrients in solutions soak into every tiny wettable space available, then according to what ratios of sand or silt or clay is present (& the mineral nature of the soil)
many nutrients will adhere or become tightly bound onto mineral surfaces ... and or adhere to soil organic matter in the soil ... & may thus become extremely difficult if not impossible to remove.
4) If you plan to strip nutrients out with chemicals , ... then won't these then become the next chemicals you'll need to try to remove?
5) what are the unintended influences of treating these soils on the original field soil qualities?
6) is it ever possible to remove the inputs of compost or fertilizer & at the same time not strip out the nutrients that were in the original field soils?
7) what are the original soil qualities you're desiring?..
8) what are the costs of human or mechanical efforts, or materials costs required to treat soils ?
9) are the treatment costs in excess of any benefit you may hope to achieve by re-use of the original field soils?
10) can you remove higher concentrations of organic matter from the field soils amended by compost using the same stripping treatment required to remove fertilizer nutrients? ...
11) if not then can you say you have the same treatments or effects on these soils?
12) what are the original aims of your experiment? what do you want to achieve?
why remove the nutrients? are you planning to do bioassays with mycorrhizal fungi, or trichoderma, or "EM" - effective microorganisms? surely you can't be serious about removing or neutralising nutrients ??? You definitely need a 'control' treatment to compare with other treatments with "biofertilsers", but even pasteurisation affects nutrient availability. It's simple enough to set up randomised pot trials to compare soils +/- microbial inoculants... lots of published journal literature available, but also textbooks on mycorrhiza , Australian, Indian, US, UK & various European. Please let me know if you'd like some references,
Dear friend, I do not know any special protocol to solve your problem. But the best way to remove nutrients from soil that I know is to grow plants on it. The plants extract the nutrients than you remove them.
Dear Researcher, the reason why soil nutrients may be neutralized in the first instance is when the soil has been excessively loaded. the procedure to be adopted depends on the goal of land management.and ecology of the site. for instance, if your goal is to reclaim a deused mine site already excessively loaded with acid one may adopt human constructed wetlands - made up of shallow water ponds consisting of water plants such as cattails.
I agree with Don Graves.... nutrients are actually the end product of a chain of decomposition of soil organic matter that you want to stimulate or improve. If you extract them, some will soon appear as a result of microbial and fauna induced activity. A key element in the sort of experiment you do is also how naturally occuring processes combine with organic input management. I would only advise to choose a naturally poor soil to have a better expression of the treatment you want to test.
In principle you could use synthetic soil, i.e. mixtures of pure sand and pure clay minerals.
Instead of using soil for u r experiment , u can use soilless cultures means coco peat. In soil less cultures there is only availability of Organic Carbon no any nutrient is present in that cultures.
I have still not been able to appreciate why you need to remove the nutrients. Is it that you want to 'exhaust' the soil of N and P so that you get better expression of the biofertilizers. We just inoculate in various soil types- the PGPR traits on vegetables show up admirably in the presence of farm yard manure. Work in actual farmers systems so that the recommendations of cultures is adopted easily and is realistic.
i am very thankful to all of you for your valuable comments. Don Graves and Desiraju Rao sir, actually i have done an experiment to compare the influence of compost produce from different substrates to inorganic fertilizers. i have done that experiment in soil beddings. Now that i have to do new experiment in same plot/ bedding soil, i need to neutralize the soil in bedding to start new experiment so as to balance the soil nutrients for new experiment. @ Sujit Patil, idea is to check the suitability in field soil....
Hi Naseer, ... I'm sorry but the picture is still not clear to me.
If you need to re-use a field soils there are fundamental problems you could expect .. & more importantly
WHAT QUESTIONS DO YOU NEED TO ASK YOURSELF OR YOUR SUPERVISOR???
1) following on from the comments above by Desiraju Rao ..... how realistic or easy to adopt are the recommendations of your research to the cultures, farmers or land users that may require answers to their problems?
2) are the field soils really in such short supply?
3) what influences, minerals or organic matter do you expect to remove? .... nutrients are much harder to remove compared to put in soils, ... nutrients in solutions soak into every tiny wettable space available, then according to what ratios of sand or silt or clay is present (& the mineral nature of the soil)
many nutrients will adhere or become tightly bound onto mineral surfaces ... and or adhere to soil organic matter in the soil ... & may thus become extremely difficult if not impossible to remove.
4) If you plan to strip nutrients out with chemicals , ... then won't these then become the next chemicals you'll need to try to remove?
5) what are the unintended influences of treating these soils on the original field soil qualities?
6) is it ever possible to remove the inputs of compost or fertilizer & at the same time not strip out the nutrients that were in the original field soils?
7) what are the original soil qualities you're desiring?..
8) what are the costs of human or mechanical efforts, or materials costs required to treat soils ?
9) are the treatment costs in excess of any benefit you may hope to achieve by re-use of the original field soils?
10) can you remove higher concentrations of organic matter from the field soils amended by compost using the same stripping treatment required to remove fertilizer nutrients? ...
11) if not then can you say you have the same treatments or effects on these soils?
12) what are the original aims of your experiment? what do you want to achieve?
Dear Naseer, All the questions raised by Don Graves are fundamental to Soil Science, Fertlity and Biology. I would as a starting point ask you to go through any textbook of soil science that will explain clearly the concepts of soil pH, buffering, CEC, AEC, Organic matter, Clay-organic matter interactions, nutrients availability, soil structure, soil biology.
You cannot treat any soil artificially without altering any of these. If you feel you need more advice you an call me: 91-9303129740 because it is not possible to explain in words. Don Graves has been very exhaustive with his questions and he is actually is saying that you cannot do ANYTHING to a soil without altering something else. Hope it helps.
Thanks a lot Don Graves and Desiraju Rao for your precious time and suggestions. Definitely i will think on the points which you have mentioned. Thanks once again Desiraju Rao for this much concern, i will reach you in near future.
Hello Naseer........i think u have got ur confusion cleared with the answer given by Don Graves and Desiraju Rao. U need to be to first clear about the concept that what neutral soil is?? i think u r doing work on vermicompost technologies...in our agriculture sector number of research have been done and going on effect of vercompost as well as biofertilizer on crop yield, soil physico-chemical and biological properties and results are promising.....so if u are little bit more clear about ur objective then it would be easy for us to help u out.....
The results of your research on biofertilizers, if they to be useful, must be a basis for recommendations on the most efficient use of these fertilizers under natural soil conditions. A natural soil will always have other nutrients that interact with biofertilizer material to yield a soil nutient staus. The biological degradation of the biomaterials in soil yields mineralized nutrients needed by the crop. The issue is, these degradative processes are aided by microbiotica in soil that require presence on nutrients in the soil ambience for their normal functioning. It appears there fore that cleansing the soil of these nutrients will certainly make soil void of conditions conducive for the existence of these biograders that decompose your biofertilizer in nutrient releasing processes. By the way, the term neutral soil is often used when pH of soil is being described.
In soil most of the nutrients are in dynamic equilibrium. It is difficult to remove all the nutrients what you mean as neutral soil. If you wan to derive the effect of biofertilizer on vegetables devoid of nutrients in soil you may not get the desired plant growth. You better remove one of the nutrients (those may compete with biofertiliser i.e. N, P, S etc.) at a time through repeated extraction and find the ommission effect of that nutrient over biofertiliser addition. Then sum up , you may get some valid information.
In the first experiment you have done an excercise to compare the influence of compost produce from different substrates to inorganic fertilizers on soil beddings. After completion of this first experiment, before taking up the 2nd experiment, grow an exhaustive crop like maize without addition of any chemical fertilizers or organic manures so as to exhaust the nutrients in the soil beddings to a resonable extent (soil may not be exhausted with all the nutrients present in it). After harvest of this exhaustive maize crop, collect the soil samples and anlyse for its fertility status for nutrient contents and this will become intial soil test values for taking upo your new experiment. Then, you may take up the new 2nd experiment as per the schedule programme. I hope this will serve your research purpose
It is neither possible nor necessary to exhaust the nutrients present in the soil. It is enough if the soil before application of the biofertilzers is analysed for the content of nutrients and other properties. This would serve as the control. It is also necessary to analyse the soil treated with biofertilizers for the microbial load as it reflects the living phase of the soil.
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