Utilization of corn stover and pruned Gliricidia sepium biochars as soil conditioner to improve carbon sequestration, soil nutrients and maize production at dry land farming in Timor, Indonesia

By: Rupa Matheus “” IJAAR welcome all of you to submit your research paper for publication in the field of Agriculture, Agronomy, Horticulture etc. Please submit your manuscripts via Online submission panel.“” The decreasing of land productivity for dryland farming system is mainly due to lack of soil organic carbon (SOC). Carbon sequestration (C-seq) became a main issue for reducing carbon emission that affect to environment. Application of compost and biochar have proven to become a good solution for increasing soil quality and carbon storage. This research had been conducted in Timor-East Nusa Tenggara Indonesia, aims to understand the effectiveness of biochar as soil amelioration on C-sequestration, soil nutrients and maize production. Split plot factorial design (type and dosage of biochars) with three replications was used to test the hypotheses. The type of biochars were cow dung (CD), rice husks (RH), pruned G. sepium (GS) and corn stover (CS) and three levels of dosage (D1: 3 t.ha-1; D2: 6 ton.ha-1; and D3: 9 t.ha-1 ). The results showed that the GS provided the best effect on the increasing of SOC (2.09%), soil nutrient (Ntot 0.22%; P-available 11.34 ppm; K 0.62 me/100g soil), and other soil properties (CEC 28.10 me/10 g soil and reducing bulk density to 1.10 cm-3). It means GS could provide about 68.64 ton.ha-1 C-seq that still remained in the soil for the next cro GS or long time utilizations. Not only long term, this study also suggested that GS benefited for maize production (maize gain 5.88 t ha-1) at short term application. Although statically GS gave similar performance to MS but they are better than other tested biochars. As other previous studies, increasing the dosage of organic matter might affect to the increasing of soil quality and crop production. International Journal of Agronomy and Agricultural Research – IJAAR is an open-access scholarly research journal, published by International Network for Natural Sciences. IJAAR publishes original scientific research articles in the field of Agronomy and Agricultural Sciences. IJAAR published 2 Volume and 12 issue per the calendar year