Affected of Ameliorated Alkaline Water and Soil Amendments on Exchangeable Cation, Macro and Micronutrients in Sodic Soil under Drip Irrigation

The Field experiment was carried out at Anbil Dharmalingam Agricultural College and Research Institute, Tiruchirappalli using cotton (RCH- 20) as a test crop to examine the effect of ameliorated alkali water and soil amendments on soil properties, growth, and yield of hybrid cotton in sodic soil under drip irrigation. In this experiment, Drip irrigation with gypsum treatment water and drip irrigation with spent wash treatment water were used as main-plots treatments. Soil application of gypsum @ 50 % GR (5.2 t ha-1) and one time soil application of distillery spent wash @ 5 lakh litter ha-1 were imposed as sub-plot treatments. The treatment without amendments both under main plot and sub plots were used as control. The experiment was carried out using a strip-plot design with four replications. The application of additives through irrigation water (or) soil considerably decreased the pH of post-harvest soil. The soil exchangeable Ca and Mg were found significant due to soil application of amendments only and value ranged from 8.51 to 9.35 and 5.03 to 5.20 Cmol (p+) kg -1 respectively. The soil available nutrients N, P and K were found significant, and value range from 167 to 311, 15.4 to 21.5, 158 to 928 kg ha-1 respectively. The application distillery spent wash (DSW) and gypsum slightly increased the micronutrient cations range which from 4.80 to 6.85 mg kg-1 of Fe, 8.60 to 10.43 mg kg-1 of Mn, 0.64 to 0.88 of mg kg-1 of Zn, 1.10 to 1.42 mg kg-1 of Cu. The results of the field experiment revealed that application of amended alkali water and amended soil significantly increased all the growth and yield parameters of cotton. An increase in seed cotton yield of 701 and 544 kg ha-1 was recorded due to the application of gypsum treated water and DSW treated water respectively over control. Similarly, an increase of 773 and 973 kg ha-1 of seed cotton yield was recorded due to soil application of gypsum and DSW respectively over control. While considering the interaction effect, soil application of DSW along with gypsum bed treated water found to be the best for getting higher seed cotton yield (3015 kg ha-1) when compared to other treatment combination.