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Organic Fertilizers

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Organic fertilizers are produced from animal or plant material and are for that reason popular in the organic horticulture. They are sometimes used for traditional soil grown crops and to some extent as an amendment in organic substrates. There is a broad variety of source, some of these fertilizers are prepared from single

waste products of meat industry in an incubation 30 "

experiment with greenhouse soil in comparison with 25 "

mineral fertilizer -g

(Proefstation, 1954) J 20 "

• NH4NO3
• Bloodmeal
• Hornmeal

0 10 20 30 40 50 60 Days after addition protein-like materials such as blood and slaughterhouse wastes, while others are prepared from animal manures or industrial biomass wastes. Some fertilizers are formulated with specific nutrient ratios from various sources and put into the market as organic fertilizer compounds. All these fertilizers have in common that the majority of the N and partly also P is present in organic form and is released gradually through decomposition by microbial activity of the soil. The rate of this so called mineralization process differs strongly among different products. As is clear from the data presented in Fig. 2.2, where the release of N is shown for blood meal and horn meal in comparison with NH4NO3 (Proefstation, 1954). This process also depends strongly on temperature, humidity, pH and available NO3 in the soil. Some generally used organic fertilizers are listed in Table 2.8, together with the origin and the contents of major elements.

Table 2.8 Composition of some generally handled organic fertilizers produced from waste materials. The elements are expressed as mass %

Fertilizer	Constituents	N	P	P2O5	K	K2O
Blood meal	Slaughterhouse blood	13	0	0	0	0
Bone meal	Slaughterhouse bones	5	7	16	0	0
Feather meal	Feathers and claws of	13	0	0	0.4	0.5
	chicken
Cow pellets	Cow manure	1.9	0.4	1	2.2	2.7
Chicken pellets	Chicken manure	2.2	0.3	0.8	1.0	1.2
Malt pellets	Brewery waste	5	1.4	3.1	4.0	4.8
Ricinus pellets	Castor oil industry	4	0.7	1.5	6.6	8
	waste
Vinasse	Sugar beet industry	2	0	0	23.7	28.6
potassium

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