Projects

Federal State

Lower Saxony and Bremen

Project Title

Development and application of smart fertilizers and plant fortifiers in the ecological blueberry cultivation

Project description

Due to the ecological orientation many households in Germany focus on, the demand for bio certified berries is increasing. However, cultivation without agro chemicals involves some critical risks: For one thing due to cases of pests and illness. Other risks involve missing nitrogen sources, which are present in farm manure only in the form of relatively unstable ammonium. If the soil gets a pH value of 5 and above, the intake of iron is inhibited, which leads to deficiency symptoms and lower yields. Another problem is declining bio diversity, for example through bee deaths, leading to decreasing yields as well. Due to problems like these, organic farms focusing on blueberry cultivation harvest only 3-4 tons per hektar. Which questions the profitability of these special cultures. Our goal is to minimize economic hazards and to realize a high-yielding harvest in the ecological blueberry cultivation – mainly through the use of innovative bio-based fertilizers and fortifiers. Procedure and approaches during and after the course of the project will be made available for other economy branches as well.

Final report

Download report (PDF file)

Results focusing on practiceorientation

In the project, various N-organic fertilizers / plant strengtheners were examined for their effect on blueberries. The growth experiments showed that two classes of N-organic molecules were very promising. These included polypeptides (proteins) and their hydrolysis products (peptides and amino acids), as well as polysaccharides (chitosan) and oligo- and monoglu-cosamines. The effect of dry chicken droppings and different formulations was not so convin-cing in comparison. The experiments with blood meal / fish meal proteins showed that pro-teins themselves did not work, peptides and free. amino acids were almost completely ab-sorbed by the plants. The experiments with polysaccharide hydrolysates (chitosan) also showed acceptable results. 
The best growth results (containers) were obtained with blood meal hydrolysates. The long-term effect (depending on degree of hydrolysis) should be examined further in controlled container trials in order to  ... (see final report)&

Main funding source

Rural development 2014-2020 for Operational Groups (in the sense of Art 56 of Reg.1305/2013)

Project status

completed

Total budget applied for in EUR

492,178

Link 1

project website of EIP Lower Saxony

NUTS3 CODE

DE94D