Organic Fertilizer

 

Organic fertilizer

A cement reservoir containing manure mixed with water. This is common in rural Hainan Province, China. Note the bucket on a stick that the farmer uses to use the mixture. Organic fertilizers area unit fertilizers derived from animal matter, animal excreta (manure), human excreta, and vegetable matter (e.g.compost and crop residues). Naturally occurring organic fertilizers embrace animal wastes from meat process, peat, manure, slurry, and guano. In distinction, the majority of fertilizers used in commercial farming are extracted from minerals (e.g., phosphate rock) or produced industrially (e.g., ammonia). Organic agriculture, a system of farming, allows for certain fertilizers and amendments and rejects others; that is also distinct from this topic.

Examples and sources

The main organic fertilizers area unit humate, animal wastes (often from slaughterhouses), plant wastes from agriculture, and treated sewage sludge.

Mineral

By several definitions, minerals are separate from organic materials. However, bound organic fertilizers and amendments area unit deep-mined, specifically guano and peat. Other mined minerals are fossil products of animal activity, such as greensand (anaerobic marine deposits), some limestones (fossil shell deposits), and some rock phosphates (fossil guano). Peat, an ancestor to coal, offers no nutritional value to the plants but enhances the soil by aeration and absorbing water. It is sometimes credited as being the widest use of organic fertilizer and by volume is the top organic amendment.

Animal sources

Animal sourced materials embrace each animal manures and residues from the slaughter of animals. Manures area unit derived from milk-producing farm animals, egg-producing poultry, and animals raised for meat and hide production. When an animal is butchered, only about 40% to 60% of the live animal is converted to market product, with the remaining 40% to 60% classed as by-products. These by-products of animal slaughter, mostly inedible -- blood, bone, feathers, hides, hoofs, horns, -- can be refined into agricultural fertilizers including bloodmeal, bone meal fish meal, and feather meal.
Chicken litter, which consists of chicken manure combined with sawdust, is an organic fertilizer that has been proposed to be better for conditioning soil for harvest than synthetic fertilizers.

Plant

Processed organic fertilizers include compost, humic acid, amino acids, and seaweed extracts. Other examples are natural enzyme-digested proteins. Decomposing crop residue (green manure) from previous years is another supply of fertility. Other ARS studies have found that alga accustomed capture atomic number 7 and phosphorus runoff from agricultural fields cannot solely stop water contamination of those nutrients however can also be used as an organic fertilizer. ARS scientists originally developed the "algal turf scrubber" to scale back nutrient runoff and increase the standard of water flowing into streams, rivers, and lakes. They found that this nutrient-rich alga, once dried, can be applied to cucumber and corn seedlings and result in growth comparable to that seen using synthetic fertilizers.

Treated sewage sludge

 

Main article: Biosolids

Sewage sludge, also known as biosolids, is effluent that has been treated, blended, composted, and sometimes dried until deemed biologically safe. As a fertilizer, it is most commonly used on non-agricultural crops such as in silviculture or in soil remediation. Use of biosolids in agricultural production is a smaller amount common, and the National Organic Program of the USDA (NOP) has ruled that biosolids are not permitted in organic food production in the U.S.; whereas biological in origin (vs mineral), sludge is unacceptable due to toxic metal accumulation, pharmaceuticals, hormones, and other factors.

With results concerning human-borne pathogens including a growing preference for flush bogs and centralized sewerage treatment, biosolids are commutation compost (from human excreta), a conventional organic fertilizer that is lesser processed.