Soil microbial biomass, crop yields, and bacterial community structure as affected by long-term fertilizer treatments under wheat-rice cropping

Effects of fertilization regimes on tea yields, soil fertility, and soil microbial diversity

“…In addition, the bacterial Shannon index in NPK treatment had the lowest value of 1.714, which was in accordance with Kamaa et al (2011), who showed that the bacterial diversity was negatively affected by inorganic fertilizer alone. In this experiment, the OM treatment had the maximum bacterial diversity, followed by 1/2NPKOM+L and 1/2NPKOM, this confirmed many earlier findings that organic amendments promoted the bacterial diversity (Peacock et al, 2001;Mäeder et al, 2002;Sun et al, 2004;Gu et al, 2009), probably due to input of foreign microorganisms and improvement of soil properties under organic manure application. For fungi, all fertilization treatments appeared a trend towards distinct fungal community structures (Figure 1b), and significantly (P < 0.05) lower diversity (Table 4) when compared to CON treatment.…”

“…Soil pH ranging from 5.40 to 5.68 was not significantly different across all treatments, indicating that there was no noticeable effect of fertilizers on soil pH after 5 yr of continuous annual fertilizer applications. Yang et al (2007) and Gu et al (2009) also reported that inorganic fertilizer and organic amendment had no effect on soil pH after 22 yr of continuous annual fertilizer applications. However, Shen et al (2010) and Hu et al (2011) showed that inorganic and organic fertilization significantly decreased soil pH after long-term fertilizer applications.…”

Yield trends and nutrient budgeting under a long-term (28 years) nutrient management in rice-wheat cropping system under subtropical climatic condition

“…The grain yields of rice and wheat were significantly greater with the application of 50% mineral NPK fertilizer supplemented with 50% N through FYM (T 6 ) as compared to the recommended level of NPK fertiliser (T 5 ), whereas straw yields of both crops were similar under combined application of manure with sub-optimal doses (below 100% of fertiliser NPK). The results revealed that balanced fertilisation improves the grain yield (Gu et al 2009, Li et al 2010. Balance nutrition facilitates the translocation of nutrients to the economic part of the crop (Yang et al 2004); the residual effect of organic manures applied to rice on the grain yield of succeeding wheat was statistically significant (Bi et al 2009); but the straw yield was found to be non significant.…”

Functional Diversity of Soil Bacteria from Organic Agro Ecosystem

“…Singh et al, 2015), favoring long term soil fertility (Berger et al, 2013;Bhardwaj et al, 2014), plant tolerance and crop productivity (Bhardwaj et al, 2014), supports and strengthens productive and sustainable soil biological processes (Mader et al, 2002) and emphasizes on soil-building programmes (Abraham, 2011). Applications of biofertilizers and manure compost in organic farming system influences structure and function of soil microbial community (Marschner et al, 2003;Chu et al, 2007;Gu et al, 2009;Zhen et al, 2014;Singh et al, 2015) and the importance of microorganisms in the maintenance of quality and productivity of agricultural soils is unquestionable. (Abraham, 2011; A corollary to high potential of organic farming for sustainable entrepreneurship by small land holders of Indo-Gangetic Plains of Asia-Pacific .…”