Response of Wheat and Barley Grown on Sandy Calcareous Soils to Organic and Inorganic Application

Abstract

Wheat and barley are the most important cereal crops of Egypt and well adapted to its soil and climatic conditions. Two field experiments in spit plot design were carried out in the growing season of 2014-2015 at Mansoura University Farm, Egypt, to investigate the growth and yield of wheat and barley as affected by organic amendments with different rates of mineral fertilization. Treatments of organic were chicken manure, compost and biochar, while the studied mineral fertilizer treatments took with rates of 50,75,100 and 125%.

The obtained results showed that interaction among chicken manure and 125% minerals fertilizers gave highest values of fresh yield of wheat and barley which was 1837.5 and 1263 g m-2 respectively. The highest levels on total dry weight of wheat were found between chicken manure and 125% minerals treatments which recorded 7143kg.fed-1. While the highest values on total dry weight of barley crop was found between biochar and 125% minerals treatments which recorded 5113 kg fed-1. Also, organic-mineral fertilization interaction significantly affects both wheat and barley plant height where chicken manure+125% of mineral fertilizer treatment recorded the highest values 94.50cm and 72.25cm respectively. In both crops the highest spike length was found due to apply chicken manure at rate of 5-ton fed-1 +125% of mineral recommended dose where the spike length of wheat and barley were 11.50 and 8.00 cm. Whereas, addition of biochar +50.0 % of minerals recommended dose slightly reduced spike length of wheat compared with the control. It can conclude chicken manure treatment was the superior and gave the highest values of most tested parameters compared with other amendments.