Oxyfertigation of a greenhouse tomato crop grown on rockwool slabs and irrigated with treated wastewater: Oxygen content dynamics and crop response

S. Bonachela, J. Quesada, R.A. Acuña, J.J. Magán and O. Marfà

Agricultural Water Management, 2010, vol. 97, issue 3, 433-438

Abstract: This work assesses the seasonal dynamics of the substrate oxygen content and the response to nutrient solution oxygen enrichment (oxyfertigation) of an autumn-spring tomato crop grown on rockwool slabs and irrigated with treated wastewater of very low dissolved oxygen (DO) content under Mediterranean greenhouse conditions. DO values in the nutrient solution were clearly higher for the oxygen-enriched (14.6mgL-1) tomato crop than for the non-enriched one (4.5mgL-1). However, DO values in the substrate solution were similar for both oxygen treatments (mean seasonal values of 5.1 and 4.8mgL-1 for the enriched and the non-enriched one, respectively), except for a short crop period at the end of the cycle when they were significantly higher for the oxygen-enriched crop. For both treatments, substrate DO values were highest for the winter period and decreased progressively during the spring period, reaching minimum values of around or below 3mgL-1 at the end of the spring. The oxygen enrichment of the nutrient solution did not affect any of the irrigation and fertigation parameters evaluated in the tomato crop: water uptake, volumetric water content of the substrate, electrical conductivity (EC) or nutrient concentration in the leached nutrient solution. Moreover, the oxygen enrichment of the nutrient solution did not affect the aboveground biomass and the biomass partitioning, the fresh weight of total and marketable tomato fruits or the tomato fruit quality parameters. Overall, it appears that oxygen deficiency conditions did not occur as the substrate DO values were higher than, or about, 3mgL-1 throughout most of the tomato crop cycle for both treatments and the rockwool slabs maintained good aeration conditions throughout the whole cycle.

Keywords: Solanum; lycopersicum; Dissolved; oxygen; Fruit; yield; Hypoxia; Soilless; culture; Substrate (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378-3774(09)00320-5
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:agiwat:v:97:y:2010:i:3:p:433-438

Access Statistics for this article

Agricultural Water Management is currently edited by B.E. Clothier, W. Dierickx, J. Oster and D. Wichelns

More articles in Agricultural Water Management from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().