Net Nitrogen Mineralization from Past Years' Manure and Fertilizer Applications.

Lentz, R.D. and Lehrsch, G.A. (2012) Net Nitrogen Mineralization from Past Years' Manure and Fertilizer Applications. Soil Science Society of America Journal. 76:1005-1015.

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Abstract

Manure from the semiarid West’s dairy industries is a rich nutrient source, but its use for crops can be problematic because soil N availability from manure may vary substantially depending on the year of application. Experimental plots established in Idaho on a Portneuf silt loam (coarse silty, mixed, superactive, mesic Durinodic Xeric Haplocalcid) included six manure treatments and two non-manure treatments with four replicates. The six manure treatments included combinations of two manure rates, Man-1x (0.31 Mg total N/ha) and Man-3x (0.97 Mg total N/ha) applied in the fall either 1, 2, or 3 years previously. The two non-manure treatments were urea fertilizer applied per soil test (Fert) and a control with no amendment. We measured net N mineralization (0-30 cm) in the plots using buried bags in 2006, 2007, and 2009 for a sprinkler-irrigated barley, sugarbeet, and dry bean crop, respectively. This resulted in i) two years of net N mineralization data for each manure rate applied 1, 2, or 3 years prior to measurement; and ii) one year of data for each manure rate applied 4 or 5 years previous to the measurement year. A 5-year decay series for each of the two manure rates was derived from functions fitted to the net N mineralization data, expressed as a fraction of total manure-N applied. The decay series (y1-y5) for the manure-1x treatment was 0.23, 0.12, 0.10, 0.09, and 0.08 while that for the manure-3x rate was 0.20, 0.08, 0.05, 0.04, and 0.03. Soil at the 30-to-60-cm depth contributed up to 28% of the total N mineralized in the 0-to-60-cm soil layer of manure-amended soils in the 3rd year after application, with lesser amounts contributed in earlier years due to immobilization. The efficacy of N mineralization processes decreased as the manure application increased, thus using a single decay series to predict N availability across a range of manure application rates could lead to substantial estimation errors.

Item Type:	Article
NWISRL Publication Number:	1420
Subjects:	Manure Soil > Amendments > Fertilizer Soil
Depositing User:	Users 6 not found.
Date Deposited:	20 Jun 2012 16:17
Last Modified:	04 Mar 2014 17:16
Item ID:	1455
URI:	https://eprints.nwisrl.ars.usda.gov/id/eprint/1455