By Anna Zarra Aldrich
Nitrogen pollution is a serious concern for the agriculture industry.
Agricultural fertilizers contain nitrogen, an essential nutrient for plant health. However, these fertilizers also produce nitrogen runoff which occurs when excess nitrogen seeps into the surrounding environment, like waterways. This causes toxic algal blooms which disrupt aquatic ecosystems and pollute drinking water. Further, nitrogen from agricultural processes can pollute the air in the form of nitrous oxide (N2O), a greenhouse gas 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide.
Avishesh Neupane, assistant extension professor of soil science in the College of Agriculture, Health and Natural Resources, conducted a laboratory experiment to see if adding the chemical element manganese to soil could help reduce nitrogen runoff in agricultural soil.
He published these results in Applied Soil Ecology.
Until this study, no research had directly tested how manganese affects nitrogen cycling under agronomically relevant conditions.
Neupane, who also serves as director of the George Leigh Minor Center for Plant and Soil Health at UConn, worked with his team to compare soil that had been treated with nitrogen fertilizer for the past 27 years and soil that had had no nitrogen input in that period. They tested three different levels of manganese: 0, 50, and 250 milligrams per kilogram of soil.
Source : uconn.edu