Use of bone char and biochar for recycling phosphorus into agricultural systems.

Phosphorus (P) is a plant macronutrient and soils located in tropical regions generally show low content of this element. Moreover, these soils are acidic and show high fixing capacity of phosphorus, substantially decreasing fertilizers efficiency. For this reason, annual P inputs to soils are required to obtain feasible crop yields. The main concern regarding P in agriculture is this element is extracted from mines that are being depleted. For this reason, it is necessary to develop recycling P technologies in order economize mineral resources and obtain benefits from low cost sources locally available. Bones are a P-rich material that could be employed for P recycling; however, this sub-product from meat industry needs to be treated prior use to ensure health safety. Pyrolysis is a technology that has gained attention because it does not affect bone mineral structure as does calcination, which is a standard treatment. Performing pyrolysis of bones generates a material called bone char and tests suggests that its efficiency is comparable to common soluble fertilizers obtained from P rocks. Another way to obtain higher crop P and other nutrients absorption as well as yield, is to stimulate symbiosis of plants with arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF), which are naturally found in soils. However, acidic soils from tropical regions generally difficult plant-AMF interaction due to high amount of exchangeable aluminum present. An alternative to overcome this issue would be to apply pyrolysis to organic wastes, generating a material termed biochar, which is rich in carbon, and sometimes nutrients, assisting AMF-plant symbiosis. Our aim was to produce through pyrolysis a set of bone chars in different temperatures (400, 550 and 800 °C) and atmospheric composition (sealed chamber, N2 flux and steam flux), and perform a detailed characterization of the resultant materials (chapter 1) to verify which possible factors are controlling bone char efficiency as fertilizer in a pot experiment labelled with 32P (chapter 2). To test the symbiotic pathway in P acquisition by plants through biochar use, two biochars from eucalyptus wood chips were produced at 300 and 700 °C and applied to a soil inoculated or non-inoculated with AMF. In this experiment we analyzed plant growth and colonization by AMF as well as nutrient absorption (chapter 3). Additionally, a trial with AMF spore germination evaluation was performed to investigate the possible inhibitory or positive effects of the biochars on AMF fungi.Tese (Doutorado em Solos e Nutrição de Plantas) - Escola Superior de Agricultura Luiz de Queiroz, Universidade de São Paulo, Piracicaba. Orientador: Takashi Muraoka (USP); Co-orientador: Etelvino Henrique Novotny (CNPS)