Opportunities and challenges of bio-based fertilizers utilization for improving soil health

Abstract

Bio-based fertilizers (BBFs) have been promoted as a solution to help manage bio-waste problems and improve soil health conditions. Their potential is to replace mineral fertilizers due to nonrenewable energy dependency and the accumulation that threatens environmental issues. Currently, laboratory and field-based literature have been growing since European Union (EU) looks BBFs as the future of agriculture bio-based products. Nevertheless, it is worth to summarizing the results on a regular basis. The added value of this work is to study the opportunities of bio-based fertilizer utilization to sustain plant productivity and investigate the challenges to water footprints and human health. This study found that contamination of heavy metals and pathogens is the main problems of BBFs implementation which need more attention to develop the technology process including the environmental risk assessments. Furthermore, compared to mineral fertilizers, BBFs have obstacles to getting social acceptance due to the challenges of transportation and production cost, the concentration of nutrients, matching crops, and policy framework. To sum up, BBF is a long-run scheme that should be started to tackle global issues since the potency as energy alternative sources to support the circular economy paradigm.

Stimulatory effects of smoke solution and biogas digestate slurry application on photosynthesis, growth, and methylation profiling of solanum tuberosum

“… 2 This warrants the need to use biostimulants or biofertilizers that can boost the plant productivity. 4 Different biostimulants, such as amino acids and hydrolyzates, were obtained from plants, animals, microorganisms, and industrial by-products that when applied improved the plant growth. 1 , 9 In this study, exogenous application of plant-derived smoke (SMK) and BGD slurry on potato is reported that improved the photosynthetic parameters, pigments, growth, and altered genome-wide methylation profile.…”

“… 3 One of the resource efficient approaches is to employ the bio-based agents (biostimulants) that can positively stimulate the physiological processes of plants. 4 …”

“… 5 They enhance the nutrient uptake, crop quality and also help them survive in stress conditions such as salinity, varying temperature, and water scarcity. 4 , 6 , 7 Biostimulants are classified on the basis of mode of application (soil or foliar), natural sources and the method through which they were produced. 8 They are derived from wide array of biological substances such as microorganisms, algae, plants, animal, seaweed, humic substances, and other industrial by-products.…”

Multiple Soil Health Assessment Methods for Evaluating Effects of Organic Fertilization in Farmland Soil of Agro-Pastoral Ecotone

“…Soil health index (SHI) could integrate different types of physical, chemical, and biological variables into a composite index that is widely used for evaluating soil health. SHIs have been developed for evaluating the influence of different field management measures [15][16][17] or different land use types [18][19][20][21] on soil properties, revealing their impact on soil productivity and ecosystem function [22][23][24][25][26]. SHI was often used to evaluate the influences of the ecosystem, such as the soil quality after deforestation in Northern Iran or ecological risk by soil heavy metal pollution [27].…”

Effects of the application of microbiologically activated bio-based fertilizers derived from manures on tomato plants and their rhizospheric communities

“…This is mainly due to the need to assess the nutrient use efficiency of BBFs and RENURE fertilizers in valid comparisons with synthetic fertilizers, as well as the need to further investigate their environmental impacts 3 . The microbial composition of BBFs may also deserve more attention, as BBFs can contain pathogens, depending on their source and on their production processes 8 . Recovery processes during the production of BBFs might also be detrimental and could potentially eliminate ubiquitarian beneficial microorganisms for soil that were present in the source material, because of high temperatures and/or the presence of toxic compounds at high concentration.…”