Reduction of Synthetic Fertilizer for Sustainable Agriculture: Influence of Organic and Nitrogen Fertilizer Combination on Growth and Yield of Green Mustard

Abstract - Organic fertilizer is capable to decrease the use of synthetic fertilizer due to release of plant nutrients and improvement of other soil properties. The objective of this experiment was to compare the growth and yield of green mustard as affected by cattle manure and litter compost. The experiment was conducted employing Completely Randomized Design with 8 treatments. Treatments included litter compost and cattle manure at rate of 25 Mg ha-1 and 15, 20, 25 Mg ha-1 with addition of 1.85 g nitrogen fertilizer per plant, respectively. Each treatment was replicated 5 times. Soil used in this experiment was Ultisol collected at depth of 0-20 cm. Five kg of soil was mixed with organic fertilizer according to each treatment and placed in 10 kg polybag. Green mustard was planted to each polybag. Nitrogen fertilizer was applied a week after planting. The experiment revealed that application of litter compost and cattle manure at rate 25 Mg ha-1 with additional nitrogen fertilizer resulted in higher green mustard fresh weight per plant and number of leaves. On the other hand, application of both organic fertilizers at rate of 25 Mg ha-1 without addition nitrogen fertilizer as other treatments did not provide significant differences on most variables observed. This indicated that application of organic fertilizer is able to reduce synthetic nitrogen fertilizer for green mustard production.