Effects of Time Based Integrated Organic and Mineral Fertilizer Rate Application on Improved Coffee Cultivar Yield at Awada South Ethiopia

Abstract

Coffee Production plays a significant role in Ethiopian economy, even though the productivity at farm level is among the lowest as compared to other coffee producing country. Soil degradation is one of the most challenging problems in coffee growing areas of Ethiopia. Declining soil fertility is a fundamental problem to agricultural growth and a major reason for slow growth of food production. Therefore, this activity was designed to determine optimum application time of integrated organic and inorganic fertilizers under coffee growing areas and to assess the effects of temporal application effects of integrated organic and inorganic fertilizers on coffee yield and yield stability performance of coffee cultivar. The experiment was conducted with RCBD design with four replications and ten treatments settled from integrated organic and inorganic inputs at Awada Agricultural research sub-center starting from 2013-2023 for the last 10 consecutive years. The result demonstrated that, application of 200kgha<sup>-1</sup>N, 77kgha<sup>-1</sup>P and 12.5ton ha<sup>-1 </sup>integrated nutrient application at each cropping season resulted statically significant higher yield result as compared to the other nutrient applications. The plot treated with the recommended NP + recommended decomposed coffee husk application per year (200kgha<sup>-1</sup>N, 77kgha<sup>-1</sup>P and 12.5ton ha<sup>-1</sup>) indicated over all yield advantage over the other plots by 22.07% or 345kg/ha of clean coffee yield over the recommended (200kgha<sup>-1</sup>N, 77kgha<sup>-1</sup>P) applied alone per year and 33.39% or 522kg/ha of clean coffee yield over the plots treated with recommended decomposed coffee husk (12.5ton ha<sup>-1</sup>) alone application per each cropping season.