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Beneficial Uses of Compost in Florida Vegetable Crops - Page 3
Florida is a major vegetable-producing state, with 418,000 acres under cultivation each year. Sandy soils used to grow Florida vegetables have low native fertility, so they require relatively high fertilizer inputs. Minimizing fertilizer leaching or runoff has become important due to potential negative environmental impacts. If water and fertilizer conservation could be increased, grower input costs and negative environmental effects could potentially decrease.
In recent years, composts produced from a wide range of waste materials have become available in Florida on a large scale. While environmental regulators are mainly interested in compost trace metal concentrations, growers have different interests once compost has passed regulatory health and safety standards. From a commercial vegetable grower's point of view, compost quality is judged based on moisture and nutrient concentration, pH, soluble salts, organic matter concentration, C:N ratio, water-holding capacity, bulk density, cation exchange capacity, particle size, presence of weed seeds, and odor.
When compost is incorporated into soil, observed benefits to crop production have been attributed to improved soil physical properties due to increased organic matter concentration rather than increased nutrient availability. Optimum chemical and physical parameters for composts that might be used in vegetable crop production are listed in Table 1. Compost is not considered fertilizer, however, significant quantities of nutrients (particularly N, P, and micronutrients) become bio-available with time as compost decomposes in the soil. Amending soil with compost provides a slow-release source of nutrients, whereas mineral fertilizer is usually water-soluble and is immediately available to
plants. Compost usually contains large quantities of plant-available micronutrients.
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