RESEARCH ARTICLE
Evaluation of Nitrogen Bioavailability Predictors for Poultry Wastes
C. Wesley Wood*, Maribeth C. Duqueza, Brenda H. Wood
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2010Volume: 4
First Page: 17
Last Page: 22
Publisher ID: TOASJ-4-17
DOI: 10.2174/1874331501004010017
Article History:
Received Date: 5/03/2009Revision Received Date: 25/09/2009
Acceptance Date: 29/09/2009
Electronic publication date: 8/7/2010
Collection year: 2010
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Long-term land application of manure, litter, and dead-bird compost generated during poultry (Gallus, gallus) production may oversupply nitrogen (N) and result in nitrate (NO3-N) contamination of groundwater. A barrier to judicious use of poultry waste as a fertilizer is the absence of management tools for prediction of waste-derived N released during the plant growing season. This study was conducted to establish an N extraction method for poultry wastes as a predictor of soil N release owing to land application of poultry waste. We correlated N released from 87 different poultry wastes in a 60-day incubation with seven bioavailability predictors. Bioavailability predictors included autoclave-calcium chloride (CaCl2) extraction, bicarbonate extraction, Walkley-Black (acid dichromate) digestion, acid permanganate digestion, pepsin digestion, protein extraction, and barium hydroxide extractable glucose. Results indicate that acid permanganate digestion (r=0.77) has the highest potential for predicting N mineralized from poultry wastes followed by sodium bicarbonate extraction (r=0.51). However, the relationships are not strong enough to indicate that these methods would be useful in a practical, predictive sense.